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A MEMORIAL 



Edward Rowland Sill 



WHO DIED FEBRUARY 27TH, 1887. 



Proceedings of the Memorial Meeting Held by His Friends 

UNDER the Auspices of the Berkeley Club, at 

Oakland, Cal., 14TH April, 1887 



TOGETHER WITH 



EXTRACTS FROM HIS CORRESPONDENCE 



' At every hour, in every place of meeting. 
Where we together shared delight and pain. 
Yes, everywhere will dear thoughts keep repeating, 
^ Here, too, his voice, his look, his touch, remain!'' " 



PUBLISHED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION 



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MEMORIAL MEETING. 



Judge J. H. Boalt, Chairma?i, introduced the proceedings with 
the following remarks : — 

Before proceeding with the exercises that have been arranged 
for this evening, it may be expedient to preface them with a 
few words of explanation. 

The Berkeley Club has been accustomed for now many 
years to meet every alternate Thursday evening and listen to an 
essay prepared and read by one of its members, which was 
usually followed by a general discussion of the subject matter 
of the essay. During these years we have been compelled to 
mourn the loss of some of our most useful and valued mem- 
bers, and on several occasions we have deemed it fitting to 
alter the course of our fortnightly meeting and substitute for 
the usual essay and discussion commemorative papers and 
reminiscences of these lost friends. 

When the intelligence of the death of Professor Sill reached us, 
it was determined thus to set apart one of our Thursday even- 
ings and devote it to memorial exercises in his honor. It soon 
appeared that there were many among his old pupils, and col- 
leagues, and friends, who desired to join with us in offering 
tributes to his memory ; and almost before we were ourselves 
aware of it our Club memorial meeting, by a quiet and spon- 
taneous growth, expanded into this larger gathering of friends 
and admirers of our late associate. A public notice would of 
course have brought together a much more numerous assembly, 
but it was felt that such publication would have been a de- 
parture from the spirit which was the inspiring cause of this 



( 4 ) 

reunion, and that it wouUI lin\o l>oon in the highest degree 
ropugnant to the wislics ot" our dcpartetl tViend. It is honor- 
able to him that so slight a notiee shiniUl have brought together 
so large a gathering. 

I'rotessor Sill \vas not a man whom it was easy to know. That 
he was neither cold nor repellant the number and strengdi of" 
his friendships abundantly testify. Hut he liad some ot' that 
wise reserve whieh eomes sooner or later to all men ot" thought 
— the reserve that springs from an acquired consciousness that 
first thoughts are ot^en only the forerunners of better thoughts 
— the suggestions whieh come before knowledge. In him this 
was accompanied by a certain quaint shyness, which was not 
the least of his many attractions. It belongeil to a poetic 
temi^erament, wliii-h was exquisitely sensitive to impressiiMis, 
and was the natural companion of a retined mind, exceedingly 
fastidious in choice of word ami act. It is said by those who 
knew him best and longest, that many, e\cn o{ his friends, 
knew but one side of him, and that the pliases of his character 
to these friends unknown were fully as admirable as those that 
had excited their love aitd respect. Inhere are those whom we 
learn to esteem after a slight acquaintance ; what we know of 
them is so agreeable that we do not need to advance further. 
We shall hear to-night from those who knew our lost friend in 
difterent capacities, and under ditTering circumstances, and 
may thus be enabled to supplement our own knowledge o\ him 
bv their report. Without such intormation, we should hardly 
be able to gain a full comprehension of him, for he was like a 
fine landscape, which, although beautiful from any standpoint, 
is onlv thoroughly appreciated when seen from many different 
points of view. 

To me, and 1 believe to many others present, tlte death ot 
Professor Sill will always seem peculiarly regrettable, because it 
was the premature ending oi a career that might have become, in 
a broad and marked sense, n\emorable. For this man seemed 



( 5 ) 

to me to possess that rarest of gifts, the true poetic soul and 
temperament. I thought I found in some of his poems a 
purity of tone, a delicacy of feeling, a refinement of expres- 
sion, which belong only to genius. I hoped for a fuller devel- 
opment of his powers in a wider atmosphere. I believed that 
somewhere in the future willing laurels were waiting for him. 
It seems to me hard measure that this bright spirit should pass 
away almost before the glory of its presence had been discov- 
ered. 

]]ut it is consoling to remember that our friend cared little 
for the praise which follows success. I think indeed he had a 
certain dread of applause. He looked upon it as a pitfall in 
the way of merit. He feared its power to degrade an aspira- 
tion into an ambition. He preferred the clear perceptions of 
his own mind to the imperfect understandings of others. He 
realized that praise is often misled and therefore, to the extent 
of its influence, misleading. In his view the main point was 
to build up not reputation but character. This was the one 
thing valuable and to be sought with earnest single-mindedness. 
To put too much value on the good opinions of others was 
therefore to place an unnecessary temptation in one's path. If 
one gained the lofty altitude toward which he ought to aim. it 
was of very little consequence what people said about it. And 
he lived as he believed. 



The following letter from Professor Baldwin, of Yale, was 
read : — 

My Dkar Mr. Palmer : 

I wish I could be with the Berkeley Club next week, and 
bear more of Sill's life among you as a man. By his publica- 
tions, mainly, I know him in the maturity of his character ; but 
to me the real picture and the deepest memory is that of the 



dreamy, impetuous, sensitive, thoughtful youth of college days. 
His bent then was all towards the pursuit of the reflective and 
imaginative, rather than the exact or the historic. If he was 
any man's disciple, he was Carlyle's. There was nothing con- 
ventional in his ideas of things. He must translate human 
experience into his own thought and language. He must 
verify his own propositions. 

The world was no fool's paradise to him. It looked often 
black, and always dark — dark with mystery, if not with anguish 
of soul. " We all remember," he wrote in his junior year, in the 
Yale Lit., "that day in our boy-life, when first the individual 
' I ' isolates itself and grasps the truth that 7ny identity is of no 
more importance in the great sum of things than any other 
single one of these that are born, and eat, and die about me ; 
nay, more, — is of less importance than many, because worse or 
weaker than they. And as the truth dawns upon the mind 
that all men are not equal, that he himself must go through his 
existence inferior in brain and soul to many of his fellows, the 
mind opens with a great sigh to take in this truth ; patiently, 
sometimes, — oftener with the whole heart rebelliously clenched 
against it." 

He had no patience with the mere man of business, who had 
no aspirations beyond money-getting and honor-getting. " Poor 
petrifactions of men," he said, in apostrophizing them in the 
same article, " one shudders even to imagine you, at last, when 
the great veil is being lifted, with your weazened, world-crusted 
souls, cringing into the dim outskirts of the presence of the 
Eternal." 

I was much impressed by this solemn and vivid word-picture 
of the Last Day when I first read it, twenty-seven years ago, 
and I am no less so to-day. He had from the first a rare 
power of painting in words, whether he chose prose or poetry 
to work with, and his feeling was his own. It came unbor- 
rowed and unbidden. 



( 7 ) 

Of course, his thoughts were not always of a serious kind. 
He loved fun as well as any of us, in his quiet way, and was 
ready at joke and banter, cutting deep sometimes, but never 
ill-naturedly. It was not a merry crowd, however, that he 
loved best ; but quiet companionship with chosen friends. 

College life he took in a leisurely way, valuing it for what it 
brought as well as for what it was. He read more of what was 
not required of us than of that which was, and the honors he 
took, whether at the hands of the Faculty or of the students, 
were such as go with general literary and oratorical power, 
rather than scholarship. He was not one of those who are 
always in a hurry. The drift of his mind was something like 
that brought before us in his lines : 

"Still move the clouds, like great, calm thoughts, away, 
Nor haste, nor stay." 

Two men in our class were very much to each other — Sill 
and Shearer. It w^as a deep grief to Sill when they were parted 
by Shearer's early death in 1869. He could hardly speak of 
it. The friends of both can think of them now as met again, 
perhaps, in some great order of things, where characters have 
time to ripen and opportunities to hold as well as seize ; or 
rather where ''time shall be no more," and opportunity has no 

limits. 

Yours sincerely, 

Simeon E. Baldwin. 

New Haven, April 5th, 1887. 



EARLY MANHOOD. 

Mr. C. T. H. Palmer read the following : — 

In the allotment of short papers aiming to portray in order 
of time the various periods in the life of Edward Rowland 
Sill, it has fallen to me to begin the series by recalling him in 



( 8 ) 

his early manhood, and by noting how he " changed not, only 
grew " to the hour of his death. 

We met first in April, 1864, a point of time to him exactly 
half-way between the cradle and the grave. This happening 
has no significance to others, but to me it is most felicitous. I 
saw him when the introspectiveness of his boyish and college 
days began to change into the action of more outward life, and 
I have watched from near at hand the orderly unfolding of that 
action, year by year, into the ^^ pleofiousia," or fuller life, the 
potentiality of which he delighted to find in all men, and the 
power of which he mourned to find in so few. What I saw of 
the fruitage in the last half of his life is enough and more than 
enough to give me the keen sense of irreparable loss, because 
I was not allowed to watch the germination, the first swelling 
out to meet the breath and the warmth of nature, the budding, 
the earliest flowering, of this most rare, amaranthine, and in- 
destructible soul. 

For nearly all of the first two years, we were in the same 
room in every business hour of the days, and in the same house 
or under the same trees through the living hours between. Our 
business was chiefly the purchase of gold dust from miners and 
assaying it in bullion at a country banking house in Folsom, 
You all, who have known our friend, will understand at once 
how uncongenial the business hours were to him. He knew, 
better than most men do, how poor and lean a thing money is 
as mere money, and how it stunts one back from the real life. 
He had a horror for the thoughts and aims that money bieeds 
in man. The exact calculations in computing assays, the 
accuracy required in keeping the bank's books of account were 
painful things. But he never consented to do the most painful 
things ill. Unable to be unconscientious in his work, he made 
his calculations and kept his accounts with conspicuous, if 
costly, accuracy. And, separating the money idea from gold, he 
loved to handle the gold itself as an object of art. It pleased 



( 9 ) 

him, with the fingers of an artist, to bring the gold dust out 
clean from its clog of black sand ; with the eye of an artist to 
see the beautiful flood of metal leap from the crucible to shiver 
and stiffen in the ingot-mould ; and, most of all, to watch at the 
close of cupellation, the iridescences of the rainbow blended 
upon the trembling drop of purified gold. The poet's eye saw 
the round beauty that comes with the instant of perfection. 

But there were more human alleviations to the dreary hours 
of business. When the iron doors of the bank clanged together 
in the afternoon, four emancipated young men went to a home, 
where, with others of a better sex and of various ages, we all 
lived friendly with each other. The one thing which will 
never become faint out of my prolonged intercourse with him 
is the memory of the evenings and the half-nights and some- 
times the whole nights, when v;e " outwatched the Bear " 
together in the circle-work of determining how rich this poor 
world might be made to become, and more especially, of try- 
ing to settle our own souls. These foregatherings were always 
in a garden-hammock swung under the "three ancient trees," 
the life of which he has preserved in the delightful poem of 
" Home," written then and published three years after in his 
first volume of poems. No one was with us except our 
thoughtful pipes and Leo, a favorite Newfoundland dog, who 
usually slept so long as we remained within orthodoxy, but was 
apt to stir uneasily and whine a contradiction from his instinct, 
when we traveled beyond bounds. What was thought and 
said in those long but swift nights, — who can ever say again? 
I am sure that there are those here to-night who would gladly 
bear with me in any imperfect attempt to reproduce one of 
those communions, or, I should say rather, of his inspired 
monologues, but there are limitations here now, as there were 
none there then. And the despair of this memorial meeting 
is, that after all is said that will be said, some of you must go 
away, each thinking, — " The half has not been told ! I too 



( lo ) 

have known such hours and better hours with him, and if I 
had felt the right to speak words that they could hear out of 
those hours, /could have invoked into this room a beloved 
spirit and made him visible." 

At the time of these conversations, our friend was in the 
condition of spiritual unrest which has a cycle in early manhood. 
Three years afterwards, he saw more clearly over the interrup- 
tion between the known and the unknown life, when he went to 
the Harvard Divinity School with his nearest friend, Sextus 
Shearer, to study theology. There his old doubts returned, 
and his intellectual integrity compelled him to renounce forever 
the possibility of preaching what he could not know. In after 
life he always said, he could not see — he could not see — why 
should he try to blind himself by peering into the invisible ? 
But he never let go the hope, that as the end of known evolu- 
tion is in the known man, the crown of a possible evolution 
will be the completed man. In his last volume, the poem of 
" Roland" seems to tell me much more than the characteristic 
suggestion of the name : — it tells me of his spiritual vision for 
whom the name stood. And in the poem of "The Invisible," 
after two pages of suspicions against immortality, he challenges 
Death as the Angel of Separation, with this single and sutiti- 
cient line : 

" Nay, I'V our wottdroiis being; nay 1"' 

He felt the wonderfulness of the life this side of Death, and 
that its incompleteness required something beyond. From 
his published words and, much more, t'rom the varying flood 
of what he has said and written to me, I am assured, that 
while his spirit was too honest and humble to dare to push 
assurance beyond knowledge, he always hoped " in the power 
of an endless life." 

At this time he sought other and more active relief from the 
smother of business : he superintended a Sunday School. It 
was the onlv dav in the week that he owned, and he irave it 



( IT ) 

away as he gave everything, enclosing himself in the gift. 
Doing such work he was in his place. There are those here 
who know personally, and better than I do, how in that little 
country Sunday School he unsealed the eyes of children, who 
had been staring without vision, and revealed to them the 
majesty of the smallest things on earth, and such unawakened 
potencies in their own being, that if they would but be lords 
of themselves, they might become the over-lords of others. He 
was born to inspire. The result was there, as it has since 
been here, and always was to be everywhere in every stage of 
the longest life he might have lived. Young men clung to him 
even with a strange passion : young girls worshiped him and 
only asked that it might not be afar off. WTiat such new 
planet had ever " swum into their ken "? This was never won- 
derful, and, least of all, at that time. The grace and manly 
beauty of his bearing was that of a young Greek : the large, 
warm eyes looked afar out like the eyes of Shelley. In a life 
which has been made happier by many friendships, I can recall 
only one other man who possessed a power of fascination akin 
to his. Wherever either of these men settled himself, to him 
came hurrying through the air a crowd of eager souls bringing 
their best treasures, and swarmed upon him, like happy bees. 
There is but one way in which I can explain this fascination. 
Manly beauty alone, the most gentle masterfulness of manner 
alone, the poetic contagion alone, will not do it. But it is 
a part of that rarest and incomparable gift of humanity, — a 
bisexual soul. Have we not sometimes felt that this also be- 
longs to revelation, though unwritten ? — " from the beginning, 
male and female created He some of their spirits." In music, 
that note from another thrills when it finds its own chord 
within us. We love that in another which we are glad to love, 
and aspire to perfect, in ourselves. Either sex found in our 
friend something of itself or its own best possibilities, — and 
that may be more desirable to some than either complement or 



( «-^ ) 

supploiuont. Tlierc may come jnun in such devotion as there 
must come happiness ; but that keen, ha[ipy pain, who would 
lose? And such ilevotion may give, as well as receive, the 
happiness and the pain. May it not give something more? 
There is educaticM\ in the interplay of innocent emotions. I 
renu lubcr the lietence of the Jewish prince, who, when he was 
fainting witli hunger, did but taste of the honeycomb before 
him ; and lo I his eyes were enlightened. 

Most of the short poems in his first volume were written 
during those two years at Folsom. So, too, was one which 
should not have been omitted from it, — the brilliant poem for 
the Associated Alumni in 1S65, which compelled California to 
recogni/c a new poet. The time would fail me — does indeed 
tail me and belongs to others — to say words about his skylark 
singing, when his whole natmv throbbed and panted with poetic 
aspiration. Nor may 1 enlarge upon the wondertul power as 
a teacher, Inspirer indeed, which he afterwards exercised at 
CX\kland and in the University at Herkeley ; nor upon the way 
he increased himself as a literary man, growing as a tree grows, 
in every direction. 

We are not here as the Egyptian Assessors of the Dead — we 
are not just or good enough for that — but as those who loved 
him, exchangiiig experiences of the ways in which he iiifused 
himself into our own lives. If we say, then, that he was a man 
of unusual mental git'ts, an educator of high order, a poet of 
much merit and more promise, a shrewd critic and a writer of 
pleasant prose, a shv, modest man who did not always sign his 
name to his best work or play, one who attracted good and 
repelled evil ii\ otliers, — what is all that excein a miserable 
half truth ? If that were all, we should not be here. I hold it 
to be wrong and a shame to make the word of our mouths less 
than the word in our hearts. Shall he, who was a prince 
among us, be embalmed in common rags for his cerements? 
Let no one belittle the truth. For this man was alwavs distinct 



( -3 ) 

from men, — a slender flower among thorns — a diamond in the 
drift of the conglomerate — a charming holiday among the weary 
working days of the world. In his bearing he was a knight in 
all except the spur and sword of chivalry. He was free as a 
waft of warm air to all who could receive and breathe him ; 
hardfast as the cruel cold ice to those whose contact would 
stain him. His beautiful genius was his birthright and its airy 
play his life. So far, every one may say and still be measuring 
words. But those who have been quickened by his friendship 
may take up the theme and carry it on. '['hat friendship was a 
great rock in place to which they went for shade and rest. In 
compelling them to love him he compelled them to love them- 
selves more wisely. Toward him they will henceforward press 
on, hoping to see that soul in its transfiguration. " Our won- 
drous being " was his argument for the fuller life : the wonder- 
fulness of his being and its beauty, while yet unfinished, will be 
to them an argument for that vista of living in which we may find 
completion but cannot see the end. We call it immortality. 



Portions of letters from Charles Warren Stoddard^ and R. E. C. 
Stearns, of the Smithsonian Institute, were read : — 

Df,ar Friend : 

It was good of you to write. I didn't know Sill very well. 
I always admired him and wanted to love him, but was afraid 
to. You know his pencil was as graceful as his pen. Once 
when I took him an album and asked him to add a sketch, 
with his atitograph, he asked me what he should draw for me. 
I said a palm tree. When he returned the book he added, 
"I've made you something you stand more in need of." It 
was an iceberg. 

I spent a night at his home in Oakland — a little house like a 
bird's nest, very shady and fragrant, I think you were there 



( M ) 

during the evening. I slept on a lounge in the parlor almost 
within reach of the piano. When he said good-night — he 
seemed like a boy then, and was gleeful — he told me if I 
wakened in the night I was to go to the piano and tell him so. 
I didn't waken. The atmosphere of the place was singularly 
restful. Somehow I kept thinking of Shelley and of a life apart 
from the world. 

I have not seen him for years nor heard from him — save a 
few lines he sent when I went to Notre Dame. 

I can add nothing to this, save that I find consolation in 
remembering the work, the great, good work he did so mod- 
estly, so conscientiously, so quietly. 

Sincerely yours, 

C. W. Stoddard, 

Covington, Kv., 6 April, 1S87. 



Dear Professor Kellogg : 

I am exceedingly grateful for your kind note of the 2 2d 
March, informing me of fhe proposed memorial meeting of the 
Berkeley Club for our friend Sill. Words utterly fail to 
express how severe a shock the knowledge of his death has 
given me. I am still dazed, and cannot really feel that he is 
dead, for though we had not met since before he left Berkeley 
our correspondence was so frequent, and its character as well 
as our relations sdch, that it has seemed as if all that was 
needed at any time in order to feel the pressure of his hand, 
was to reach out my own. 

I look back to the year 1874 as especially memorable. 
About the first of January my term of service in connection 
with the management of the affairs of the University com- 
menced ; in the following May the office of the Secretary was 
established at Berkeley. A few months after my appointment 
Mr. Sill was elected Professor of English Language and Litera- 



( 15 ) 

ture, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Mr. 
Swinton. The termination of Mr. Swinton's incumbency 
occurred at a time when the University was at the mercy of 
one of those political tempests which test the strength of a 
ship. In glancing at the varied aspects of the situation at that 
time, it will be seen that Mr. Sill entered upon the duties of 
his chair under auspices not altogether favorable. His 
standard was high, and his devotion to his work absolutely 
sincere. I have reason to believe that he was unusually 
systematic, and, without being severe, still a rigid disciplina- 
rian — in fact, put conscience into his work, and expected 
conscientious work from his students. However, he soon had 
his department well in hand, and the respect and esteem of the 
best students soon were his. 

I had never met Mr. Sill before the date of our connection 
with the University. I knew of him through friends of mine 
who were also his friends; but \felt that I knew him, by reason 
of the admirable poem which I had read and re-read — the 
poem that he contributed to the famous Alumni celebration in 
Oakland, at which Edward Tompkins presided. If this poem 
had been read at Harvard under similar circumstances, Sill's 
name and place as a poet would have been recognized and 
■proclaimed at once. As the world goes, locality and environ- 
ment count for something in the appreciation, placing, and 
honoring of men. 

Sometimes there was between us an exchange of clippings 
from the papers — odd scraps of humor illustrated with off-hand 
pen-and-ink drawings. I have one of his enclosures before me 
now — a clipping from the " Boston Transcript," verses entitled 
"That Amateur Flute," with two pages of note-paper covered 
with drawings by Sill illustrative of the poem, all exceedingly 
amusing. And so the tone and flavor of our correspondence 
ran from gay to grave, from lively to severe. As my eyes look 
upon the letters, clippings, jokes -and puns, notes and queries 



( 'f' ) 

before mo, how very nonr lie seems I — how impossible that he 
is dead! "March 19th, 1883," in reply to mine, he wrole : 
" The sj)rig of laurel was received and gave us a pleasant sniff 
of home. Thank you. It came unbroken in your ingenious 
casket; the only 'laurel' I have received so far." Again he 
discourses on the beauty of snow crystals, or about some curious 
bug, or writes elocjuently of the scenery of California or else- 
where, or mentions some book that he has read, that is worth 
reading. I will close with an extract from another letter : 

" It is lovely in the White Mountains. They're little fellows 
considered as mountains, you know ; but there's lots of quiet 
beauty up there. Beautiful fresh woods for one thing. Do 
you remember how the white birches gleam out among the 
dark firs and spruces ? and the cool depths of the maple 
woods? Birds, too, no end ; because of the greenery and the 
brooks." 

I can go no further. Here let me rest, grateful that so 
noble and true a life has been a part of mine. 

RoBT. E. C. Stearns. 

Washington, D. C, April 4, 1887. 



AS A COMRADE. 

Dr. J. K. McLean read the follcncing : — 

The part assigned me in these exercises is to sper.k of our 
friend within that relation under which I knew him best — as a 
comrade in outings. Very much that I could say and would 
like to say of him outside of this special ground, I am, there- 
fore, constrained to leave to others. 

Sad as is the task assigned me, not even its great sadness 
can altogether quench the delight of it. For quite thirteen 
years Professor Sill and I were accustomed to go on outings 
together; into all sorts of places, almost, and by all sorts of 



( '7 ) 

ways. From a good half of our beautiful State there come 
up to me at this moment tender and fragrant recollections 
of tramps and camps, expeditions by rail, on horseback, 
and on foot ; of hours spent prone beside ferny springs, 
perched on sunny mountain crags, couched beside brawling 
streams; of days following the trout streams and the deer 
ranges, and of nights spent under the open sky. From the 
redwoods of Mendocino — great trees he loved so well — to 
the snowy flanks of Shasta and the limpid depths of the Mc- 
Cloud River, come recollections — made sacred now — of ad- 
venture and misadventure, and, if I may say so, peradventure, 
too ; into all of which the sweet and gentle spirit of our friend 
has so interblended itself as that every one of these things 
shall be to me forever monumental of him. 

On these expeditions, every experience was accepted by 
Professor Sill with a keenness of zest that would allow neither 
himself nor those who were with him to take it as in the least 
commonplace or annoying. With equal enthusiasm would he 
'court the shy wood humming-birds and delightful water-ousels, 
and coax the lizards ; help to fell trees for river foot-logs ; gather 
fir and redwood boughs for bedding, and chop stumps for 
fuel ; take out rattlesnake fangs for microscopic examination, 
stalk deer, and praise the forest flowers and mountain lilies. 
Combined with the poetic faculty in him, which seemed to be 
specially stimulated and drawn out by all these out of door in- 
fluences, our outings developed also in Professor Sill an inextin- 
guishable boyishness of spirit and expression, which made his 
companionship as fresh and breezy as any upland slope we ever 
visited. 

He possessed that cardinal trait for true companionship in 
outing — the disposition that makes both conversation and 
silence equally unoppressive and restful. Through the entire 
gamut of topics conversable would we go, soon or late ; some- 
times talking day long and half the night in humor earnest and 



( kS ) 

phiyliil, on o[\wv ihivs ami nights lapsiiii; into a siloiico wlui'li 
socmod wliolly in i)lacc and without need tor apology. Rare, 
goldon lottor tlays wero those ! Am 1 disconsolate tliat they 
are torever ended? 1 am supremely grateful they ever began ; 
etided they have no{, nor ever ean. 

It scMuehow grew up between us that Professor Sill was I/aak. 
Walton and 1 Haniel Hoone ([Momnmeed always and earetullv 
" Pan'l "). ^Ve have scarcely spoken or written to each other 
imder other names for years. Alas and alas that it shi>uld all 
be over ! Is it possible I have no gentle, loving-eyed, contem- 
plative 1/aak. with and tor whom to concoct impossible schemes 
of adventure and to invent serio-whimsical notions of lite and 
manners? This habit of thirteen years, so grown into second 
nature, how can it be so rudely broken otT! Twi^ world 
moving schemes in particular must now die luueali.-ed : one 
tor a balloon motor up Moimt Shasta and i>ther steeps, the 
other o( an institution for the develo|Mnent o( human souls — 
any applying soul to be given six months" time in which to 
show its possibilities of development ; tailing in which, it to be 
shot without ajipeal. 

I cannot tell at all how it came about that we two. who were 
not so very intimate in other ways, grew to be so associated as 
comrades in outing. lUit in some way the association Wvis 
fonned, became a close and nuite constant one, and ended 
only with Trotessor Sills removal from the State. Indeed, it 
did not end then. In spirit and by letter we have kept on 
making trips aiui tramps as we used to do in tact, Iziak with 
liis tackle, Oan'l with his gun, and both packed whimsically 
down with grotesque and serious notion and idea. Our ordi- 
nary outht was tar more notional than real : one stew-pan to 
forty notions. 

You do not know a man thoroughly, my friends, imtil you 
have ou/t-ii with him. 1 mean by that, not i\KTely to have trav- 
eled with hin\ over ordinarv routes bv sea or laivd ; but to have 



( 19 ) 

tramped with him, camped with him, clomb with him, swum 
with him, fished with him, hunted with him, shared blankets 
with him ; gone partners with him both in the cooking and the 
clearing up of the cooking ; in gathering bough beds and 
making camp fires, killing snakes, skinning deer, dressing fish, 
and burning hornets' nests. All this is the most penetrating 
test of character to which you can possibly subject fellow 
mortal. Outing, in the thorough sense of the term — going away 
alone with a man, time after time for a period of years, outside 
of the last lines of civilized restraint, and putting him and your- 
self back upon the original, unrestricted ground of savagery — 
is the most searching and perilous of all possible tests, either of 
character or of friendshijj. As for such exj^editions men put 
on their oldest and simplest suits for the body, so do they wear 
their oldest and least artificial suits of character. And as they 
come back, usually, with the one suit torn to tatters and left 
fluttering upon the chajjparal, so do they exactly also as regards 
the other. It is rent to the quick by the unwonted exigencies. 
All of one's nice sense of the proprieties, all of his mere extra- 
neous manfulness, is sulijected to such a strain that it is certain 
to be left, with his garments, shredded by the way, and his 
veriest self apparent. Outing, as a disclosure of character, has 
in it a power second only to the highest of all revealing powers : 
it is quick and powerful, sharjjer than any two-edged sword, 
piercing even to the dividing asunder of .soul and spirit and of 
the joints and marrow, and is a di.scerner of the thoughts and 
intents of the heart ; neither is there any creature that is not 
manifest in its sight. 

What 1 have to say to you, my friends, for our Professor 
Sill in this connection, is that having gone outing together the 
nine times, we neither of us flinched from going again the tenth : 
and having gone the second nine times and the third, we did 
not hesitate to go again and again, up to the full ten times ten. 
And in all that experience I saw in him only the truest and 



( -'o ) 

most real of men. A real inaii. and with all o( the hoy loft in 
him, too. 

In one sense most uncciualiy yoked togolhor wore wo ; in 
another not. He the poet, 1 the pathlinder. He quiok to in- 
terpret the hidden meaning of the things we found, and to render 
it into words, 1 helpful in fniding the things. So, we supple- 
mented eaoh other, and had the advantage of two horizons. 

In all our nuiltitarious adventures and misadventures — and 
soon and late, these quite equaled those in number — Professor 
Sill never lost temper, or cheer, or zest, m' resource. My 
comrade never shirked his part o( the work, nor postured in 
doing it. He never either took secretly the best piece ot our 
poor provision, nor — which is a still more revealing thing — the 
worst piece ; but straightforwardly and as matter of course 
appropriated his half of both pieces, and without remark left the 
other halt". All of which, taken not in sense material, means 
a great deal more than most of you will take it for. 

In a word, what I am desiring to convey in this manner of 
speech — which however it may appear to any, is to me in the 
profoundest degree pathetic — is, that peeling otY the last layer of 
all that is conventional, extraneous, and, so to speak, tailor-made. 
Professor Sill appeared, under the most searching of all possible 
lights, the same genial, gentle, unpretentious, sincere. dee{> 
sighted, quick-witted, real, delightful, gifted, lovable, unweary- 
ing, mantul, communicating man at core, that he elsewhere and 
under other conditions. <//y'(-.7/r</ to be. I can conceive of no 
stronger thing to say of u\y tViend than that. 

While I am sure 1 by no means comi">rehended all that was 
in Protessor Sill, 1 think I was so placed as to sc<r all that was 
in him. And I delight to say it was all sweet, and genuine, 
and purely and fragrantly mantul. Others can say to what 
extent he was poet, thinker, teacher, friend. I can say he was 
altogether a man ; and as a comrade was without his peer. 



( 2J ) 

The /ollowin;; letters were read : — 

To THOSE ATIENDING THE MEMORIAL SERVICES FOR J'rO- 

FESSOR Sim. — 

Mv Frii:ni;;s : — It is with sincere regret that I announce 
my inability to he with you upon this occasion. 

There are men and women among you who are well able to 
rate at its true value the scholarship of the late Professor Sill, 
well able to appreciate his ability as a critic and his power as a 
poet — but none who can feel the loss of the friend more than 
I do. During my brief professional career in Berkeley, Pro- 
fessor Sill was unwearied in his efforts to advance my interests, 
and the unobtrusive manner and the sweetly given advice (so 
characteristic of the man), made our intercourse a source of 
unbroken harmony. I cannot be with you in the flesh, but I 
mourn with you in the S[;irit. 

Very respectfully, 

John Murrav. 

Samta Maria, Cai,., April 8, '87. 

My Dear McChesney: 

Nothing that I can say about dear Sill seems to me just now 
worth saying at all. It was my fortune to stand for some years 
very near to him in certain regards, and to gain an insight into 
his fearless, devoted, and generous heart that I may not hope 
to descrilje to anybody else. It was also my lot to owe to his 
friendship, counsel, and intercession, the attainment of some of 
the greatest prizes that I shall ever dream of finding in life. 
Meanwhile, so much about his nature remained in the midst of 
all this intimacy beyond my power to appreciate as I ought — 
in .so many ways he was too wealthy a soul for me to respond 
to — that I am sure you could not find a worse person among 
his friends than myself if you want to get a fair account of his 
genuine character and quality. I know too little of him, after 
all. What most strikes me about him, at this moment, is the 



( 22 ) 

fact that he was, I might almost say, slain solely by his zeal for 
his ideals. With other men ideal aims are often matters of as- 
piration. With Sill they were his constant companions from 
moment to moment. With other men, too, such ideals are apt 
to be rather dreams than task-masters. Sill's ideals were as ex- 
acting as the calls of the most prosaic and harassing business, 
even while they were the ideals of a born poet. You could 
never catch him at a moment when he was or could be false to 
them. He was full of humor, but he could never jest at his 
ideals. Once in sportive conversation I remember his chancing 
to say, in condemnation of some philosophic doctrine : " If 
that be wisdom, may I never be enlightened ! — But no," he 
added at once, and reverently, " I will not say that even in 
jest. Whatever conies, may we be some day enlightened." 
Sill loved his friends, and was the most loyal of men to them, 
but he could never hear from them an offence to these ideals ; 
and at such a time he always spoke plainly. 

In the service of these ideals he cared of course nothing for 
popularity, although by nature he was intensely sensitive to per- 
sonal conflicts of all sorts. Once I found him very gloomy. 
His work at Berkeley was wearing him out, and certain of his 
worst pupils, to wliose interests he had been showing his usual 
unsparing devotion, had just been paining him by bitter 
speeches and cruel misunderstandings. I gossiped on about 
the affair to him, in an irresponsible way, of course, until among 
other things I said : " You see, Sill, all this comes from your 
determined fashion of casting pearls before swine. Why will 
you always do it?" — "Ah, Royce," he responded, with a per- 
fectly simple and calm veracity in his gentle voice, "you never 
know in this world whether you were really casting pearls at all 
until you feel the tusks." 

As for Sill's ideal itself, it was an ideal of the highest man- 
hood, an ideal towards which he desired all his friends to 
strive. His ideal future man was the combination of the truth- 



( 23 ) 

seeker and the doer of good into the one person of the true 
poet. He never would admit any real opposition between the 
scientific and the poetical spirit, or between either and the 
capacity for simple practical devotion to one's daily tasks. We 
ourselves, he taught, make in our false one-sidedness the so- 
called oppositions of these ideals. In themselves they are one. 
Science is, or ought to be, poetry, and poetry is knowledge, 
and the humanity of the future will not divide life, but will 
unite it. To bring such manly unity into his own life was his 
constant effort, and he perpetually invited others to join in the 
truly humane task that he wanted to have proposed to the men 
of this so divided and unhappily specialized generation. Labor- 
ing in the service of such things, Sill sacrificed his health, and 
finally his life. 

I beg your pardon for the inadequacy of these few pages. 
Yours very truly. 



JOSIAH ROYCE. 



Cambridge, Mass, April 6, 1887. 



AS A TEACHER. 



Mr. J. B. McChesney read the following : — 

In June, 187 1, the Board of Education of Oakland elected 
Edward R. Sill to a position in the Oakland High School. He 
was then a resident of Ohio, and personally unacquainted with 
the members of the School Board ; in fact, I doubt if half a 
dozen families in the city had ever heard of him. When he 
reported for duty the High School had less than one hundred 
pupils enrolled, and he was the only teacher besides the Prin- 
cipal. His work embraced a variety of departments at first, 
but he was mainly occupied with Latin, Greek, and Rhetoric. 
His connection with the school lasted until May, 1874, when 
he resigned to accept the position of Professor of English Lit- 
erature in the University of California. 



( 24 ) 

These three years of Professor Sill's life occurred at a time 
when he was still sustained by the hopes and ambitions of youth. 
He thus entered upon his labors with a zeal and enthusiasm 
tempered by a judgment derived from experience. As I revert 
to those three years I am more and more impressed with the 
value of his labors. The citizens of Oakland will never realize 
hmv valuable his services were in promoting the interests of the 
young High School. Both teachers and pupils were encour- 
aged and strengthened by the interest and earnestness he dis- 
played. 

From my intimate association with him, both in the school- 
room and out of it, I had opportunities for observing his 
methods and for becoming thoroughly familiar with his motives. 
Were I to characterize Professor Sill as a teacher by a single 
term, I should call him an enthusiast. This expression, however, 
may imply so much, and be so varied by its applications that it 
needs explanation. His enthusiasm was not fitful nor aimless. 
His scholarly habits had put him in thorough possession of his 
subject, so that he did not talk at random, nor suffer the discus- 
sion to wander. With a perception unusually keen, he saw 
what points should be made, and his tact and skill guided him 
unerringly to the desired end. His wide reading and close 
thinking had thoroughly equipped him for every emergency. 
What a sovereign contempt he had for those teachers whose 
stock of knowledge scarcely equaled that of their pupils ! They 
were trifling, he would say, with the human soul, one of the 
most heinous sins a mortal can commit. 

That he might be more successful in his chosen profession, 
he had made a careful study of psychology. He realized that 
if he would produce the best effect upon the mind, he must 
necessarily have some knowledge of the character and opera- 
tions of that which he would mould and fashion. With his 
trained powers of observation, his keen insight into character, 
and his familiarity with mental processes, he was enabled to 



( 25 ) 

read his pupils as an open book, and of them it may be truly 
said they were "as day in the hands of the potter." This 
gave him a great advantage in his labors, as he saw even better 
than the members of his class themselves what and where their 
impediments were, and he also knew just how to remove these. 

His enthusiasm was governed by sympathy and large heart- 
edness. He saw human beings groping in the dark, and he 
would lift them up to the light. He saw ignorance a breeder 
of crime and misery, a constant source of expense to the state, 
and a curse to the individual. Knowledge was the angel who 
would raise them above the earth and give them a foretaste of 
heaven. This fact was to him so real and of such vast import- 
ance, that it became the central, animating thought of his life 
as a teacher. It encouraged him in moments of depression, 
and gave a sweetness and irresistible charm to his enthusiasm. 
By this phase of his character his pupils were made to long 
earnestly for that knowledge which would put them in more 
complete possession of themselves and thus enable them to 
satisfy a noble ambition. 

His enthusiasm was effective because it proceeded from a 
lofty sense of duty. It was not an enthusiasm assumed for the 
occasion. With true poetic vision he saw various possibilities 
in the life of each of his pupils which might develop selfishness 
and a low ambition, or nobility of character and delicate moral 
perception. The direction that these growing powers should 
take was largely confided to him. He must answer for the suc- 
cess or failure of a human being. He keenly felt this responsi- 
bility, and it was at times almost overpowering. To a man of 
blunted perceptions, or to one who is forever peering into a 
dense fog, these considerations are of little consequence, 
but to him they were everything. Every lesson had a meaning 
beyond its literal construction. It was a means to an end. 
The end he saw clearly, and he saw as clearly how to make 
each particular exercise conduce to that end. More than this. 



( =6 ) 

he made the end attractive. His pupils were not directed in a 
line of work by mere didactic metliods, or by formal logic, but 
by sound logic clothed with warm feeling. The judgment was 
convinced and the heart captured at the same time. Hence 
his enthusiasm was infectious. Herein lay his greatest power. 
The time any teacher can devote to his pupils is at most but a 
small fraction of their lives. His real success will depend upon 
the hopes he inspires, the aspirations he quickens. He only 
scatters a tew seeds here and there at best ; fruition depends 
upon future cultivation, and this future care Professor Sill's 
enthusiasm secured. Years have passed since many of his High 
School pu|nls have seen him, but they still bear with them, in 
growing strength, the noble ambition his enthusiasm inspired. 

Professor Sill's success as a teacher depended largely upon the 
high estimate he placed upon education. Growth in knowledge 
was to him a highway which led to all good. He saw about 
him an external world, abounding in wonders, resplendent with 
beauty, sublime in its grandeur — all, the visible expression of 
an Infmite Being. Nature in all its moods, phases, and forms 
was a pathway which led to God. The lack of an appreciation 
of the truths of science or a perverse blindness to the miracles 
which are daily performed in om presence, indicated, to him, a 
heart in direct antagonism with the Creator. Knowing that 
Professor Sill held these views, we may readily understand the 
basis of his motives and the sources of his ambition. 

His paramount interest in humanity was characteristically 
shown by a remark he made to a friend during an evening call. 
This friend had been discoursing in eloquent terms upon the 
beauties and refining influences of the rocks and waterfalls of 
Yosemite Yalley. ^Ve listened deeply interested in the poetic 
descriptions of the enthusiastic narrator and the claims he made 
for the natural displays of that wonderful region as worthy our 
study and love ; but when he had done Professor Sill remarked : 
" Do you not think a human being is more worthy our thought- 
ful solicitude than any inanimate object ? " 



( 27 ) 

When he was connected with the High School, much was 
said at teachers' conventions and by the public press about a 
" practical education " — an education j^articularly intended to 
fit one to acfjuire wealth. He had only sorrow and contempt 
for those who earnestly advocated such views, 'i'hey would 
place human beings on the plane of mere animals. He 
believed that if sufficient attention be given to the proper devel- 
opment of the intellectual and spiritual nature, crime and 
'mi.sery and want would largely disappear, and there would be 
little need for almshouses or institutions to help those who were 
unable to help themselves. His idea of education was too 
exalted to consider its source and end as confined to providing 
the material wants of mankind. He would say let the courses 
of study, the methods of instruction, and, above all, the per- 
sonnel of the teachers, be such that the child is put in the best 
possession of his faculties, and his intellectual and spiritual 
nature awakened to a correct appreciation of his personal 
worthiness, and there would be no difficulty about his getting 
on in the world. 

With a person possessing a character such as this I have 
briefly outlined, actuated by the purest motives and inspired by 
the noljlest ideals, deeply impressed with the grandeur of the 
teacher's calling, absorbed in his labors even to forgetfulness of 
self, with a zeal untiring and directed by sound judgment, with 
delicate sympathies and a generous love for humanity — it is 
unnecessary to say that such a person would be a successful 
teacher. Professor Sill possessed these qualifications, and 
besides appreciated their value. He saw his opportunities with 
the broad vision and keen insight of a poet. He had a poet's 
ideals and a martyr's conscientiousness in obeying their dic- 
tates. Being thus equipped, he was a rare teacher — one whose 
value is beyond appreciation. 



( 28 ) 

Air. F. H. Adams read the follmvin^ paper by Miss M. W. 
Shinn of the same class : — 

The class of the Oakland High School to which I belonged 
had the good fortune to enter the school at the time Mr. Sill 
came to it, and to send its graduates to the University just as 
he went thither. A few of us, therefore, passed our whole 
preparatory and college course under his teaching. What that 
most happy and potent teaching was, no one who was not his 
pupil will ever know. That Mr. Sill was much in the relation 
of teacher to pupil that he was not in any other relation, I 
realize when I fall in with some old schoolmate who had scarcely 
seen him for a dozen years, and never knew him outside the 
schoolroom, and find response to part of my knowledge of 
him that I do not find met by his most intimate older friends. 
I cannot give them that knowledge. But I address also a num- 
ber of my fellow-pupils ; I may at least recall to them some- 
thing of our common memories of Mr. Sill. 

Since his death, circumstances have brought to me a good 
many expressions of feeling from these fellow-pupils, both of 
school and college. I have been struck by the unfailing reit- 
eration of two things : " I feel it a deep personal loss ;" and 
"He has profoundly affected my whole life for good." It is 
surely a very rare thing that a teacher should so remain, a vital 
and daily force in the lives of young men and women, a per- 
manent object of strong personal affection, after years of sep- 
aration, at the most eager and changing period of life. Some 
of those who thus remember him were his pupils for only 
one year, fifteen years ago. I might try to give some analysis 
of this great and lasting influence — for Mr. Sill's teaching rested 
on fixed principles and had definite methods, and many of its 
effects were the well calculated results of these. But I may 
not take the time for such an analysis, and, therefore, I must 
pass by the principles and methods of his teaching, in order to 



( 29 ) 

speak of what I cannot but conclude was yet more potent in it 
— the uncalculated and unconscious effect of the man himself. 
It was not a little thing for children, in their early teens, to 
be thrown for their chief daily intercourse into the company of 
a man whose singular honor and purity of spirit, whose eager- 
ness of aspiration, whose uncompromisingly high intellectual 
standards, so penetrated him, I may literally say body and soul, 
that they expressed themselves all day long in every word he 
spoke and every expression of his face. Boys and girls at that 
age are not altogether unspoiled, but they have much simple 
good will, and they readily believe in nobility. In their com- 
pany, such a man as Mr. Sill, to whose ideals of thought and 
behavior the world of men and women was constantly a shock, 
and who could not but feel that in that world such ideals would 
easily seem quixotic— in the company of children, such a man 
could drop many of his safeguards of reticence, and fearlessly 
and habitually speak his best feelings. He was nowhere freer 
from constraint and self-consciousness than in the schoolroom 
his consciousness went out absolutely into the flock of chil- 
dren. " How blessed," he wrote to me when I began to teach, 
"how blessed to lose one's individuality for weeks together in 
a company of children ! — the purest sort of a Nirvana." Day 
after day, as he moved about the room with this beautiful un- 
constraint, he would as freely scatter among us his best and 
finest thoughts. He would break off a warning about a coming 
examination, to say: "You see the school machinery betrays 
me into appealing to these lower motives for doing your work ; 
but I strive against being drawn, or letting you be drawn, into 
any such routine. You should do this in the best way, because 
it is the best, and your whole future life, your eternal destinies, 
will be affected, according as you live each part of your life, 
while you are in it, up to the best of your ability." He would 
put down his book to come around to the front of his desk, 
lean against it, and say : " You haven't your minds on this ; 



( 3o) 

you think all this learning your conjugations is part of a prelirri- 
inary exercise you are to be put through, and then you will leave 
school and begin Life. You don't see that this is Life that you 
are in now, living it well or ill ; you are part of the rolling Uni- 
verse, part of the great web of human life and human destiny ; 
and these conjugations are the particular part of it you are con- 
cerned with now." It is surprising, when one sees how life 
goes outside, to think that any man could so implicitly place 
his trust in the greatest motives to control the conduct of human 
beings ; he simply would not compromise with any lower ones 
— would not use our ambition or self-interest of any sort, not 
even our desire to please him, as stimulus to our work. But 
intellectual curiosity, and a sense of the fascination of learning, 
the beauty and resource of the Universe, it was his constant 
effort to awaken, no less than grave moral motive ; and 
these, too, he awakened partly by well calculated effort, but 
more by his own love of learning and of beauty, freely expressed 
before us, and so spontaneously and eagerly that we could not 
but be more or less carried along with it. The personal vivid- 
ness and charm of the man enforced all that he said — the 
transparency of his body to his soul, through eyes and voice 
and gesture, so that even when he said nothing, the flash of 
pleasure and sympathy or darkening of disapproval in his face 
commented all day long on good and evil. 

Into every nook and cranny of the day's routine flowed such 
inspiring suggestiveness — by no means of grave moral import 
only ; often a flash of fancy or gayety, a passing comment that 
opened up a whole region of thought. I must not linger over 
instances ; but, for my own part, to this day I can in well-nigh 
every case trace any thought or perception of truth that for the 
moment seemed to be my own, back to some germ of sug- 
gestion dropped in my school days, and hitherto dormant and 
forgotten. 

I must leave many things unsaid and speak of only one 



( 31 ) 

more — the great educating influence that I am sure lay in the 
warmth of relation between Mr. Sill and his pupils. He had 
great affection for his classes ; he did not talk about it — that 
would have been unlike him — but he might constantly be seen 
to glance across the room, meeting the eyes of his young folk, 
with an unconscious smile of almost parental tenderness coming 
into his own eyes ; his voice and manner constantly expressed 
to them the same near and warm interest. They were not 
obtuse to this ; they believed at once and with confidence in it, 
and they appreciated it. He was an exacting teacher — he 
asked hard things of us ; he demanded prompt and absolute 
obedience ; though he encouraged freedom, he never permitted 
an impertinence ; he made no concession to indolence or care- 
lessness ; he was searching in rebuke, and held us liable to it for 
anything whatever that he disapproved, in behavior, motive, or 
character, in school or out of school ; he was often indignant, 
often severe : but impatient or cold I never saw him in the 
schoolroom ; and his pupils knew perfectly well that he cared 
very much for them, meant well, and did well, by them, and 
they responded — there was scarcely an exception in the school 
of some seventy members that I am able to answer for — with 
entire trust and admiration. One of them, writing to me of 
this, quotes a wise and pretty saying : " Young people grow by 
their admirations," and adds: "How fortunate, then, were we 
who had Mr. Sill to admire !" It seems to me that admiration 
for worthy persons and things — admiration not merely of the 
mind, but warm and loyal — is the most efficient education 
there is, to intellect and to character. The world's history is a 
record of its transforming power. Is it not even true that to 
be educated is simply to get right admirations ? 

I have spoken chiefly of Mr. Sill in the High School. His 
relations with students in the University were necessarily much 
more restricted, more complicated, and more distant. With 
these older classes, each of which contained not only ardent 



( 32 ) 

and honest souls, but its quota of crude cynicism and self- 
assertive criticism, he necessarily felt much of the same restraint 
that the outer world imposed upon him. Yet with courage even 
heroic in so sensitive a man, he unflinchingly held before his 
classes, whether they sympathized or did not sympathize, 
his dearest ideals and best thought. Repeatedly I have 
heard it said, a few years after graduation : "I never appre- 
ciated Professor Sill when I was in college ; his teaching was 
so different from any I had ever had, that I rather despised it, 
and thought it fanciful ; now I see that it was only above me, 
and it comes back to me and influences my life more than any 
other teaching I ever had." The constantly recurring phrase 
of those who speak or write about him now is : " More and 
more every year I feel grateful to him," whether from those who 
did or tliose who did not appreciate him at the time. 

But, within its restrictions, his influence at the University 
was the same in spirit and in effect as his earlier teaching, and 
so far as the relation he held to the students was not that of 
mere lecturer, but really of teacher, he was what he always 
was to his pupils — an inspiration morally and intellectually, and 
personally a wise and dear and patient friend. 

Mr. J. C. Scotch I cr read a letter from Mrs. A. J?. Bidwell : — 

[Mr. Scotchler said : — " It is my desire before reading this letter to say 
that it voices the sentiments not only of the writer, but of every member 
of the class to which we both belonged."] 

My Friends : 

Since the news of Professor Sill's death came to his old 
students, we have been living over our memories of him. He 
came to the Oakland High School when we were just getting 
otir first general ideas of life. His creed was that the most 
valuable thing in the world is human character, and that helping 
young, impressionable souls to true living is the highest pos- 



( 33 ) 

sible work one can do. This called for something different 
from the conventional relation of teacher and pupil. He 
taught us Rhetoric and Physics, Latin and Greek, but he 
wished also to teach us self-knowledge, self-control, true insight 
into life, devotion to the true and beautiful, high aspiration. 
He read his pupils' characters with keen eyes, and there was 
no escape from the scrutiny that bared to him their weak- 
nesses, their blunders, conceits, and faults. Nor could they 
resent his unsparing criticism, since it was only to help them 
know themselves. His conversation opened up to us all the 
leading subjects of human thought — art, music, poetry, nature, 
philosophy, religion, science — and he listened with wonderful 
kindliness to our own crude ideas. Outside of the class-room 
he kept us writing, reading, studying under his supervision, and 
all the results had to pass a criticism that gave no encourage- 
ment to vanity. He showed us with what rigor self-discipline 
must be conducted, and yet he made it seem attractive to us. 
He was as stern and exacting as he was gentle and kind, and 
he allowed no compromise with lower ideals. This devoted 
care he was ready to give to every student in whom he found 
capacity for work and such intellectual ability as could respond 
to his requirements ; he would take interest in all that affected 
such an one, mentally, morally, and physically — in his prospects 
and environment, his j^ast and his future — and this at what ex- 
penditure of strength and energy, what sacrifice of his leisure, 
his home hours, his needed rest ! 

Many a pupil has found upon his desk some morning a book, 
or a marked passage, containing some information he sought 
yesterday, some supplement to his own thought, showing that 
his peculiar needs were in his teacher's mind over night. Some 
vacant place on a blackboard would be found filled with a bit 
of poetry, from Tennyson or Wordsworth perhaps; photo- 
graphs of Greek and Roman statuary and architecture would 
appear on the door-casings — and many learned then for the 



( 34 ) 

first time what beautiful forms art had created, and made them 
a study thereafter. 

In the University such intensely personal teaching was mani- 
festly impossible. There were obvious limitations to the inter- 
course of students and professors. But Professor Sill's influence 
was more potent and much more lasting there than he ever 
knew. He never faltered in his devotion to the highest stand- 
ards in teaching. It is wonderful that in the face of not in- 
frequent apathy, and the struggle for college honors, a man 
could steadily speak to his classes as if they were composed of 
the highest human characters, gifted with such fine instinct as 
that which prompted his own words. There was heroism in 
his persistent holding up to his classes his most lofty ideals, his 
finest fancies, and his most sacred convictions. I cannot write 
adequately of his class-room work in the University. To de- 
scribe it would be only to eulogize it, and eulogy no one so 
dreaded as he did. It was in their characters that he wished 
his pupils to show their appreciation of his labor, not in words. 
And now we must see that the truth he lived for shall live on 
in us, and we must feel it our peculiar trust to carry on his 
work for humanity with such measure of force and wisdom as 
we may have learned. 

Sincerely, 

Clara Bidwell. 

Greeneville, Cal., April, 'S7. 

The follounng letter 7C'as read from President Gilman, of Johns 
Hopkins Utiiversity : — 

My Dear Sir : 

I have been looking over my letters from Sill, and recalling 
all that I can of his life, but I find it a very mournful task. 
He had such a noble spirit, and was so keen and true in all his 
inner life, that he seems to me to have chafed against the lira- 



( 35 ) 

itations and embarrassments to which he was exposed. Such 
fine porcelain is not the best fitted for the rough and tumble 
usages of ordinary life. On the other hand, he did not seek for 
ease or leisure ; but his dominant idea was to be useful, to 
serve his fellow-men in that station of life to which he was 
called. His letters are constantly asking for information which 
can be turned to account for the benefit of others : Where can 
I find out the world's experience in industrial education? 
What occupations are open to educated girls besides teaching ? 
Who will make a good Professor of History? Is not English 
experience in education of more value to Americans than Ger- 
man, especially in High School stages? Whom can I write to 
for information ? How ought the Reese income to be expended 
in the library? Can anybody furnish me with a list of one 
hundred good books for boys and girls ? Another phase of his 
correspondence is comment upon the aspirations, and especially 
upon the literary productions, of those whom I had known as 
students, and more whom (for other reasons) he thought I 
would be interested in. 

Of late I have heard from him less frequently. I hope he 
was at work on some good theme, and that among his papers 
will be found that which is ready to be published. Will not 
his friends in California see to it that at least there is a collec- 
tion of his poems ? 

Dear Sill! I grieve at his departure; but he has lighted 
many a flame in his short life, and so his influence will pass on 
from one to another, and no one can fix the limit to their 
radiance. 

Yours sincerely, 

D. C. Oilman. 

Baltimore, April 2, 1887. 



( :/> ) 

AS A PROFESSOR. 

Professor Miirtiu A'<//(>i;x nuu/ ///<• /(i//<>7(<i\i; /ti/rr : — 

In 1S74 Mr. Sill came into the University of California. 
President Ciihnan was then at its head, and it was not tVoni a 
lack of candidates for the vacant chair of English that his 
choice rested on Mr. Sill. Aside from the excellence of Pro- 
fessor Sill's work in the Oakland High School, his early mem- 
bershii) in our Herkeley C'lub had revealed to President (nhnan 
and others of the l'\iculty the rare (lualities which delighted the 
Club for so many years. 

His University career was in llie highest sense successful. 
The chair to which he was called is one of the most ditlicult to 
fill. It rciiuires a wide range of sclu>larship and a high standard 
of literary abilitv. It calls tor individual criticism and cor- 
rect ii)n of fault v habits of expression, and this is to some irk- 
some, or even irritating. Hut tlie better si>rt of students, who 
welcomed hcl[iful suggestions and could appreciate refining 
intlucnces, tounil in PriUessor Sill a charming and inspiring 
teacher. They liked his plain-spoken truthfulness, his impa- 
tience of poor work, his scorn of disingenuousness, his frank 
commendation of excellence, his literary intimacy with the 
earnest and choice spirits among his classes. Over some of 
his pupils he gained an intellectual influence quite remarkable. 
He recognized and encouraged all honest endeavor. He sym- 
pathized with all genuine scholarship, however backward in 
development, and fostered evgy worthy aspiration. He called 
for substance rather tluui show ; yet his own mind was so well 
poiscil, his methods were so full of intellectual grace, that his 
pupils were led to a high regard for a consuuunate fashioning 
of speech. His power of just criticism was unexcelled; when 
unfolding to his classes the merits of English authors, his ex- 
pi>silions were luminous and his suggestions insjiiring. It is a 
connuonj^lacc among his friends, that many of his pupils 



( 37 ) 

gained from him their first broad outlook, received their first 
great impulse in the higher ranges of English culture. There 
was in him a sustained elevation of thought, a poetic delicacy 
of feeling, a contagious devotion to truth and beauty, which 
brought "sweetness and light" to not a few who were in the 
spring-time of their eager lives. 

Among his fellow-professors he was not always thoroughly 
understood, save by his intimate friends. lie could be blunt 
in the expression of his ojiinions. liut his colleagues saw and 
apj)reciated his earnest regard for good scholarship and good 
order, his trans[)arent unselfishness, his fidelity to his concep- 
tions of truth and his standards of duty. They honored him for 
the fearlessness yoked with his modesty. They felt the quick- 
ening of his noble ideals — ideals not for themselves alone, but for 
the University. He set an example of patient, self-sacrificing 
work. He sought evidently the best good of the student com- 
munity. He wanted the University to be fitted for a still 
higher and more beneficent career of usefulness to the State. 

Notwithstanding his engrossing University work. Professor 
Sill was always ready to respond to calls from without. Es- 
pecially was he in request for teachers' conventions. He 
cherished a hearty sympathy for teachers, for he had been in 
the ranks. He loved to speak to them of the true ideals and 
the best methods of education. He believed that the most 
[)Otent influences in molding the young are those which reach 
them in the earlier years — the years antedating a college life. 
It was a long-chcrishcd dream of his to establish a school, for 
the sake of gaining this earlier infiucnce, and he seriously pro- 
posed a partnership in such an effort. These .sympathies gave 
him ready access to companies of teachers. In county and 
State conventions he was heard with great interest ; his crisp 
style, his pointed thoughts, his earnest wisdom, his unaffected 
elocution, never failed to win attention. In convention debates 
he was self-possessed and perfectly fearless, always zealous for 



V 



(38) 

the higher values and the spiritual influences of educational 
work. On all suitable occasions he championed the cause of 
" the higher education ;" a cause ever near and dear to his 
heart. Some of his addresses were printed, and, like his later 
articles on education in leading magazines, they are full of 
wise and weighty thoughts. He had many qualifications for 
the chair we have often talked about in the University, but have 
not yet seen established — the chair of Pedagogics. 

After all, I am aware that I do not, and cannot, furnish any 
just impression of Mr. Sill's work as a professor. His idiosyn- 
crasies gave tone and color to the whole ; and these were so 
subtle and ethereal, so potent in their vivacity and energy and 
nobleness, as to defy adequate representation. His labors were 
shot through with the charm of a unique and indescribable 
personality. I can only say of him, in Juvenal's phrase : 
'■^ Qualem nequeo mo?istrare et sentio tantuvi'''' — "a character 
I cannot set forth, but on\y feel." In common with other sor- 
rowing hearts in California I do feel, and can never cease to 
feel, the impress of his guileless and loving friendship. His 
influence as an educator is not at an end. He was cut off" in 
the midst of a fruitful manhood, but not a few can affirm that 
his life was full-orbed in the beauty of its results. To our 
intellects and to our hearts he has spoken, words we shall not 
willingly let die, so fulfiUmg his own wish : 

" I tried to find, that I might show to them, 

Before I go, 
The path of purer lives ; the light was dim, — 

I do not know 
If I had found some footprints of the way; 
It is too late their wandering feet to stay, 

Before I go." 

" I would be satisfied if I might tell, 

Before I go, 
That one warm word, — how I have loved them well, 

Could they but know ! 
And would have gained for them some gleam of good ; 
Have sought it long; still seek, — if but I could I 

Before I go." 



yj^l^\f^ 



( 39 ) 

AS POET AND PROSE WRITER. 

Dr. W. C. Bartlett read the following paper : — 

If one sees all that there is in a picture at a glance, it may 
be assumed that there is not much in it. For any thing really 
meritorious or great in art will slowly grow in the appreciative 
judgment of the observer. Defects may indeed appear upon 
the surface. But beyond the mere paint and the canvas, be- 
yond the form which the sculptor cuts in the stone, there is 
the underlying character, the subtlety of art, its inspiration, 
its power of gradual interpretation. A really great work be- 
comes in some sense a source of perpetual revelation. If we 
are dissatisfied with it at first, it will bring us back again, and 
possibly many times ; and always with a sense of new discov- 
ery. More and more, we shall come to see the hand of the 
master — his faith, his patience, his touch, the height and depth 
of his conception, his motive, and fi^nally, all those qualities 
and idiosyncracies with which he has stamped his work. If we 
make none of these discoveries, either our eyes are holden 
or rudimentary, that we do not see, or there was really nothing 
but barren surface to be seen. t 

What is true in this respect of art, is true of men.' There 
are some whose lives are so upon the surface, so smooth 
and round, and unctuous withal, that an acquaintance of an 
hour sutifices. We shall never know much more of them, be- 
cause there is not much more to be known. The veneering and 
the varnish invite to no future discoveries. More than once it 
has fallen within the range of our experience to know one 
more fully after he had passed away than when he was walk- 
ing or working in daily companionship with us. He grows 
after death. His best work savors of immortality. We have 
been constantly finding him out as it were, here and there, a 
little at a time — getting a glimpse now of him in his broader ■ 
manhood, then, perhaps, as the clear and incisive thinker ; now • 



( 40 ) 

as the man who scorns all the tricks by which mere temporary 
popularity is won. Then as the prose writer, whose vigorous 
thought was in every sentence; and again, perhaps, as the 
poet, brooding often in silence, and finally bubbling over in 
song as a thrush in the thicket. And so, with a chastened and 
clarified vision, we take up these fractional estimates, and put- 
ting them all together, the unit of expression is large. The 
many-sided man, scholarly, versatile, rounds up into symmetry 
of proportion. His angularities are softened. More distance 
helps the perspective. He is greater than we thought. His 
speech is recalled with new and broader meanings. The singer 
and the sayer — the best part of the man lives in his thoughts, 
his personality in the very manner of expressing his thoughts. 

All this is worthy to be said of our departed friend. He 
knew the art of writing in prose that did not suggest art ; just 
as the art of the painter does not suggest mere pigment and 
brushes. His vocabulary was rich in good Saxon words. He 
had dug about the roots of his mother tongue, and knew all its 
branches. There was great wealth there for him. He chas- 
tened the affluence of his speech because of his critical judg- 
ment. He chose just enough words to express his meaning 
clearly, and was content therewith. It would be hard to find a 
place in his prose composition where a word could be dropped 
out and a better one supplied. He had in this respect intel- 
lectual honesty. It culminated in force, directness, power of 
statement, with the grace and flexibility which could be em- 
ployed for the nicer shading of a thought. 

His translation from the German of " Mozart [Rau], a 
Biographical Romance," must have been a work of love. In 
the English dress which he gave it twenty years ago, although 
there was no room for original composition, there is the fine 
play and ripple of speech, the gracious setting of words, and 
everywhere the touch and tone of good literary art. He 
thought, with many others, that the essay was the best form for 



( 41 ) 

the expression of modern thought. It brings the thinker and 
the writer into an open field. There are few limitations. He 
will browse, without hindrance, in large pastures. It is there, 
more than elsewhere, that the thought coming as an inspira- 
tion will have its finest setting. Mr. Sill was at home there. 
He liked room for the play of wit and fancy — for great truths 
dug from old foundations, and for bubbles lighter than air. 
Beside his graver essays contributed to the leading magazines 
of the country, by some secret telepathy, his more intimate 
friends came to know that for many months his hand was in 
the Contributors' Club of the "Atlantic Monthly." It was the 
voice of one afar off, and yet wondrously near. There were 
mirth and music, the chastened liberty of wise speech, bits of 
brilliant talk, the brimming over of great intellectual wealth in 
the very by-play of his fancy. He had found a nook in the 
garden that suited him. He went in as one of the elect, and 
there was high and large fellowship with all kindred souls, both 
near and afar. 

The same year in which he brought out his translation of 
the German Biographical Romance of Mozart (1868) he sent 
to press the " Hermitage," his first volume of poems. He 
was not much more than twenty-five years old. At that age 
few young men have accomplished anything in literature — 
nothing of lasting remembrance. The young man had gone 
well towards the front. There was none of his age who had 
advanced beyond him. The early college promise had been 
more than redeemed. Here were two books that deserved to 
live. They are alive now, and are entitled to rank among the 
choice literature of the day. Perhaps they may yet appear in 
new editions. These early volumes did not much expand his 
purse, but they won for him literary recognition — reputation — 
a standing in the guild of letters, of more value than money. 
Had he thenceforth devoted his life to authorship, I think the 
promise of twenty-five in that respect would have been made 



( 42 ) 

good at forty-five. ^Vhile it was not in him to appeal strongly 
to the uuiltitiiLle, tlierc was that in him — liis large reserves — 
the hiding ot" liis power — which would liave won for him a 

I national reputation. If he fell short of that it was by his own 

i election. He turned to other pursuits, not, perhaps, without 

the conviction that if the poet would live by his verses, he must 

learn to live on angels' food. It is a lovely diet, but it is hard 

to get accustomed to it in this world. The scene of "The 

t Hermitage" is laid in jvirt about thist Bay. The poet comes 

/ to a new land — 

The land wliere summers never cease, 
Their sunny psalm of light and peace ; 
Whose moonlight, poured for years untold, 
Has drifted down in dust of gold ; 
^Yhose morning splendors, fallen in showers, 
Leave ceaseless sunrise in the flowers. 

It is a song in many moods — a song of life and love, of light 
and shadow, interwoven with bits of finest description. His 
eye took in whatever glory there was on the land or on the sea. 
He had the color-sense of the painter. Indeed, poet and 
painter are one, with only different modes of expression, and 
it matters little whether the song tlows on to canvas, or flows in 
rhythmic lines from the pen. In what four lines could the shore 
be etched in more completely than in these ? 

Beyond, long curves of little shallow waves 
Creep, tremulous with ripples, to the shore, 
Till the whole bay seems slowly sliding in, 
NVith edge of snow that melts against the sand. 

Years afterward he wrote of his home near by — 

There the pure mist, the pity of the sea. 

Comes as a white, soft hand, and reaches oer 
And toudies its still face most tenderly. 



( 43 ) 

Among his early poems is one — " April in Oakland" — the city 
more than any other where his heart and his treasures were : 

Was there last night a snow-storm? 

So thick the orchards stand 
With drift on drift of blossom-flakes, 

Whitening all the land. 

Amid the dreariness of an Eastern winter he sings — 

Ah, give me back the clime I know, 
Where all the year geraniums blow, 
And hyacinth buds bloom white for snow. 

These lines are not quoted as the best in his early poems, 
but rather for the local interest which they may have. Per- 
haps of all the single pieces in "The Hermitage," the best 
sustained poem is that on '* The Dead President." It is the 
requiem for a martyr in the high and holy key of martyrdom — 

Be merciful, O God ! 
Forgive the meanness of our hearts, 
That never, till a noV^le soul departs, 
See half the worth, or hear the angel's wings 
Till they go rustling heavenward as he springs 

Up from the mounded sod. 

Whether in prose or poetry, he always rose to the height of 
the occasion, uttering the thing most fitting for time and place. 
He struck no false note and wrote no unwholesome lines. His 
purity of language went well with the purity of his thought. 
Whatever distressing doubts came to him at times, he had the 
spiritual conceptions of a reverent and devout soul. Never 
was there a great poet or a great painter who did not see God, 
— did not feel Him in the Divine breath passing over the soul. 

Fifteen years after the publication of " The Hermitage," our 
friend collected and published a small volume of verses which 
bore the title of " 'I'he Venus of Milo and Other Poems." He 
had been growing in all these years. The wine of his life had 



( 44 ) 

become clear and rich. For classic grace, beauty of concep- 
tion, and sustained sweep, he is seen here at his best. He 
could not have written such a poem at twenty-five, and he would 
not have written "The Hermitage" at forty-five. He will not 
be won by any sensuous love of the \^enus. She may keep her 
train of worshipers, while his love of the beautiful shall " burn 
to light ash the earthlier desire " — 

And something when my heart the darkness stills 

Shall tell me, without sound or any sight, 
That other footsteps are upon these hills ; 

Till the dim earth is luminous with the light 
Of the white ilawn, from some fardiidden shore, 
That shines upon thy forehead evermore. 

There is a tender dissatisfaction in these lines — 

Old Earth, how beautiful thou art ! 
Save for some trouble, half-confessed, 

Some least misgiving, all my heart 
With such a world were satisfied. 

The grandest sermon that has been uttered in rhythmic lines 
in the last half-century, is in the poem which closes this latest 
volume, "The Fool's Prayer." Not many fugitive poems have 
been more widely read. It has in it the voice of the prophet 
and the priest. It turns the footstool of the king into a con- 
fessional. It ^ba5rs~cr»*l lifts up the fool into the holier at- 
mosphere of humiliation, penitence, and prayer. It convicts 
the scoffing king and sends him away murmuring, 

" Be merciful to me, a fool." 

It is a ritual fit not only for fools and kings, but for that 
large class who, being neither fools nor kings, prefer the ignoble 
and scoffing jest to any reverent expression for a faith that can 
save the world. Just over the boundary where the footfall is 
not heard, there comes as a living voice : \a'^- 

■Ci 



( 45 ) 

The ill-timed truth wc might have kept— 
Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung? 

The word we had not sense to say — 
Who knows how grandly it had rung ? 

We cannot so much as touch other points of interest. If 
the shy, sensitive poet was sometimes found walking apart from 
others, it was because, with such a temperament, he could not 
take the wider world into his fellowshii). The poet and 
scholar cannot have a universal kinship. He will be nearer 
to those of his own tastes and sympathies. But for those who 
knew him, he needed no interpreter. He was a white soul, 
walking in his steadfast integrity, and his eyes were anointed 
to see the sweetness, beauty, and grace of the world. Too 
soon for this world, but not too soon for him, were his own 
prophetic lines fulfilled — ^ 

O heart, that prayest so for God to send ' ^^^ ^S 

Some loving messenger to go before 
And lead the way to where thy longings end, 

Be sure, be very sure, that soon will come 

His kindest angel, and through that still door 
Into the infinite love will lead thee home. 



The following letters were read: — 

My Dear Sir : 

I have recently lost the use of my eyes, and can only reply 
to your request in the briefest words. It is a grief to me that 
I cannot do more ; but I have not learned to think through 
other people's hands. But what could I say that would add to 
the knowledge of those who know him in his own home ? The 
death of Professor Sill is a great loss to American literature, 
but it is a greater to those who had the privilege of his friend- 
ship. His soul was as rare as a rose-colored star. Had he 



(46 ) 

lived, he would have done his best work in the next ten years. 
Tell his friends in California how warmly I have heard him 
speak of them, and that my thoughts will be with them at the 
memorial meeting for his sake. 

Very truly yours, 

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 

Andover, Mass., April 5, 1887. 

Dear Sir : 

I am very much obliged to you for giving me the privilege 
of paying a tribute to the memory of Professor E. R. Sill. I 
enclose with this a brief poem, which I beg that you or some 
other gentleman of the Club will read on the occasion men- 
tioned in your note. 

Yours very truly, 

T. B. Aldrich. 

Editorial Office of the Atlantic Monthly, April 2, 18S7. 

EDWARD ROWLAND SILL, DIED FEBRUARY 27, 1 887. 

I held his letter in my hand, 

And even while I read 
The lightning flashed across the land 

The word that he was dead. 

How strange it seemed ! His living voice 

Was speaking from the page 
Those courteous phrases, tersely choice, 

Light-hearted, witty, sage, 

I wondered what it was that died ! 

The man himself was here. 
His modesty, his scholar's pride, 

His soul serene and clear. 

These neither death nor time shall dim, 

Still this sad thing must be — 
Henceforth I may not speak to him. 

Though he can speak to me ! 



( 47 ) 

My Dear Sir : 

It is only within a few weeks that I came to know Professor 
Sill personally ; this was on his last visit to New York. But 
for some time I have corresponded with him and have been 
among those who regarded him as one of the strongest writers 
in contemporaneous literature. It was his poetry that especially 
attracted and impressed me. I do not think it is generally 
understood that he wrote over more than one name. He would 
have been better known to the public if he had concentrated 
himself from the first upon a single pen-name, but he would 
have been not the more a poet of unmistakable vocation. 
His sudden death, in the very prime of his faculties, is an 
immeasurable loss. It was not long ago that I was urging 
him to devote himself more fully to poetical writing— feelmg 
that the country has need of poets such as he was and such 
as he promised to be— and now it is all over. 

I sincerely hope that a full edition of his poems will be 
soon issued. They have an imagination, a vitality, an ideality 
that distinguish them from the half-felt, perishable verse of 
accomplished but insincere writers. 

Respectfully yours, 

R. W. Gilder. 

Editorial Department The Century Magazine, March 31, 1887. 

My Dear Sir: 

I remember your name, through Sill, very well and in a 
way that makes it a pleasure to meet your wishes in any 
way I can. 

As to the future of what writings our friend left, all I 
know is that the editor of the Atlantic has written me that 
before Sill's death there had been some correspondence with 
the publishers of that magazine regarding collecting ,a volume 
of Sill's contributions ; and that Mrs. Sill has written to Fuller 



(48) 

that before her husband took that last journey to Cleveland 
he arranged all his papers. 

You will care to know that Mr. Aldrich (the editor of the 
Atlantic) further wrote me, regarding Sill : "I intend to have 
a tribute to his memory in the number of the Atlantic now 
in hand. I consider Sill a great loss to American literature, 
and my personal loss touches me nearly, for I had learned to 
love the man for his simplicity, his wisdom, and many other 
qualities that are not common. He was a rare man." 

Mr. Aldrich enclosed me a list of Sill's contributions, mainly 
to the "Contributor's Club," which contains about eighty titles. 
I promptly wrote him that I hoped Sill's death would not pre- 
vent the publication of the proposed volume. At the same 
time, I fear that he left no materials for a book sufficiently con- 
secutive and integrated to secure public attention. My saying 
this will, perhaps, indicate that my judgment of the work is not 
biased by my love for the man. I have had considerable ex- 
perience in judging such work in cold blood, and I think my 
judgment is as cool as it ever was when I believe that Sill 
had grown into the power to do something of as much con- 
sequence as anything any American has yet done, and that his 
death was one of those terrible wastes which sometimes make 
the system of things appear absurd. Well as you appreciated 
him when you knew him, you would find it hard to realize his 
growth in these later years. It simply amounted to a revolu- 
tion. He had come to realize the true function of his splendid 
imagination — that its place, after all, must be subordinate and 
ancillary to his judgment. He had deeply studied things as 
they are, and begun to build his system from the ground up, 
instead of from the clouds down. His later work shows this 
very forcibly. But it cannot so well show the wonderful 
progress which such habits of thought had worked in his tem- 
perament, especially in his feelings toward his fellow-men. 
Although he always loved them in the abstract, he began by 



( 49 ) 

hating them, with few exceptions, in the concrete. The " Odi 
profa7iu7n vulgus et arceo " of another poet, used to be, to a 
marked degree, his feehng. When he was in New York, a few 
weeks before his death, all this had become wonderfully changed. 
He was at a hotel on Fifth avenue. He told me that he had 
come for needed rest after caring for sick friends. 

I said, astonished : " Why, some years ago, you told me 
that the rush of life in New York actually made you physi- 
cally ill ; and you gave tha.t as your reason for hurrying 
through here once without even coming to^ see me." 

He answered : "Yes, it used to be so. I was thoroughly 
morbid. I understand it all now. But I've outgrown it. I 
don't want any better recreation now than to sit here and watch 
the stream of life go by." 

Many other things united with this to satisfy me that he had 
at last become a real citizen of this world, instead of trying to 
live in worlds that he tried to make for himself He was at 
length as well equipped with true sympathy and insight for 
work in our actual life, as he had always been with imagination 
and reasoning power. 

That he did not live to use these great and well-matured 
resources to their full possibilities, is a loss to the world. Only 
a few of us will ever know how great a loss it is. We must get 
what compensation we can, and it is an immense one, in 
realizing that we have had more, after all, than ever could have 
been the average share of influence from one of the strongest 
and truest and loveliest of souls. 

Believe me faithfully yours, 

Henry Holt. 

New York, April 6, '87. 



( 50 ) 
Dr. B. P. Wall read a poetn by Ina D. Coolbrith : — 

EDWARD ROWLAND SILL. 

Bay and cypress bring we here 
For a poet on his bier. 

Laurel for the songs he sung, 
Cypress for the harps unstrung 
Ere life's deepest deep was stirred 
And the fullest chord was heard. 

All too soon the music dumb, 
All too soon the Silence come. 

Yet among the crowned throng 
In the realms of deathless song, 
Through her late born minstrelsies, 
Rings no truer tone than his. 

In the land he loved so well 
Green his memory will dwell 
As the spring-sown leafage spread 
O'er the hills he used to tread. 
Watching, through the Golden Gate, 
Golden sunsets lingering late. 

Leave the world his name and fame, — 
Ours is yet a dearer claim. 

Leave the world the Poet's art, — 
Ours the soul's diviner part: 
All its treasures manifold, 
All the Man's unsullied gold. 
We who knew him first and best, 
Last will hold, and tenderest. 

Bay and cypress leave we here. 
Poet, — friend, — upon thy bier. 



EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS. 



Sacramento, April, 1862. 
Arrived — so soon — safe and well — ought n't I to be thank- 
ful, after such a voyage ? We landed in San Francisco last week 
Tuesday, March 25. . . . The life at sea just suited me — 
giving me a sound digestion, a deliciously pure atmosphere , . . 
to see the stars through, and that utter seclusion which has 
always been my longing— secure, too, from any haunting rest- 
lessness to be doing something — that relentless feeling, you 
know, which is always jogging your elbow whenever you get 
fixed comfortably in a selfish, idle seclusion, whispering, " Get 
up and go to work ! fellow-men — fellow-men — go to work — go 
to work!" But out there I couldn't do anything, nor have 
anything to do with anybody, if I tried — so I took my ease with 
a good conscience. Well, we had a good time, and it did us 
good — is n't that a pretty satisfactory report ? . . . We got off 
as you know Dec. 9, into a fog bank —out of which came forth 
a roaring gale, which did make us sea-sick — oh, it did. . . . 
The Atlantic was pretty rough a good part of the time, but the 
Pacific was glorious. A perfect place to eat Lotus— De Quin- 
■ cey would have gone down there to take^his opium if he had 
known of it. From lat. 40° South up to 10° or so North, it was 
just the most delightful sailing you can imagine. Steady wind 
all the time — just strong enough to s6nd us along six or eight 
miles an hour— day and night — the sea of the most beautiful 
blue color, and just pleasantly broken into little waves all the 
time, but nothing more — no rolling to the ship — no rain except 
a gentle shower occasionally — the temperature perfect, abso- 



( 5^ ) 

lutely — and such blue sky ! Such stars ! Such moonlight ! 
If a man were not immortal, I know the life for him — on one 
of the thousand islands which strew the Pacific, with a beauti- 
ful woman, a library (discarding what would make him think 
too much), a piano and an organ, surrounded by the fruits and 
flowers, " larger constellations burning, etc." — Tennyson had 
the dream — Well, being immortal, sailing through the en- 
chanted land is all that would be safe — and so much was truly 
delightful without being dangerous. 

Well, as I said, we got in last week — were disappointed in 
California's first appearance. Swore an oath at the expiration 
of the first day's travelling around San Francisco, not to make 
" this people our people, nor their God our God " — for their 
God is money. Yet I have liked it better every day, so far — 
but could not live here long — no culture, no thought, no art. 

My town here (as I call it in distinction from S 's town, 

San F.) is at present a dismantled wreck, by the floods of the 
winter — people still go about in boats instead of buggies. — It 's 
a sort of muddy Venice, with little wooden houses instead of 
the "Palace and the Prison on either hand." . . . 

F K writes that you are class poet. I am very 

glad. ... I hope you will do a better thing than I did — 
something that will have a good influence. Don't say anything 
you are not sure is true — for there is enough certain truth. 

July, 1862. 
As for me, I have come to it finally, like all the rest of 'em — 
I am to study law. And what a lawyer I shall make ! I sup- 
pose I am one of the first, though, who ever determined on 
that profession for the benefit it would be to himself spiritually. 
Yet that 's my crotchet. ' We are (some people don't seem to 
be — but you and I and a few of us certainly are) planted down 
in the midst of a great snarl and tangle of interrogation points. 



( 53 ) 

We want to find — we must find — some fixed truth. Either we 
are wrong and the vast majority of thinkers right, or they are 
wrong and wc right -and that, too, not on one pomt, but a 
thousand — points of the vastest scope and importance. As 
Kingsley puts it, we are set down before that greatest world- 
problem - " Given Self, to find God." So, considermg that for 
such tasks the mind needs every preparation, skill and practice 
in drawing close distinctions, subtileness in detectmg sophistry, 
strength and patience to work at a train of thought continuously 
Ion- enough to follow its consequences clear out, and sonie 
syst'ematized memory (if for nothing but holding and duly furnish- 
ing your own thoughts when needed)- 1 say, seeing no better - 
or rather, no .//../— way to gain these but by entering the law, 
thitherwards I have set my face. . . . I have sifted it all down 
to this conclusion -that in teaching, or in Literature, or even in 
following up some chosen science, (much less some chosen art, 
as Poetry,) the mind would not get fitted for that serious work 
which is before it. In them, it might become cultivated, stored 
with knowledge, in some sense developed - but r^ol dtsaphned 
Now just take that one question alone -Is Christianity true ? 
What impudence it would be in us to consider that settled in 
the negative, until we felt that our intellects were as strong, as 
capable of close, protracted reasoning, as little liable to be mis- 
led by sophistry, as all those greatest men who have time after 
time settled it for themselves in the affirmative. I for my part 
can see no way in which I can at the same time earn a living, 
■ and get the active Pmvers of my mind thoroughly disciplined, 
except by studying law. ... 

The only thing I have been afraid of, about you, (as I have 
thought about you out here,) is lest, having the means to choose 
freely, you should decide upon some course which would give 
your mind mere culture, or expansion (balloon-wise), without 
sterner strength. Lest, led by the sweet voices of literature, or 
^rt, or speculative metaphysics, you should frequent the bath- 



( 54 ) 

rooms (if ilu" nu'titnl };ymnnsia, with tlu-ir olive-oils, and pcr- 
fmncil ;mt)iiitiii;;s, aiul tlu" l''aloMii;in, mon- than the sandy 
oiil house when- they huil (he discus, and the boxers bulTel 
each other's stout ribs. 

-X- -x- 

/•;•/'., '6.1. 

1 have always a solenni sort of uuhhI upon me in closing a 
letter to yi)U — 1 here and you there — the wiile earth between 
us — (he little earth — for i\o we iu)t talk across it ? I'he feel- 
in;; alwa^■s comes of our being aitors in a mvsterv — children, 
whom their elders arrange in a tableau which they do not 
understand — they on\y have a strange sense of dim light, and 
hush, and a hiilden meaning, aiul so take their attituiles as 
(hey best can. 

•X- 

-X- -X 

^/i7l., '6.J. 

Next month T am gtiing to "move" — shall (juit the Tost 
Ofliee, and go up to a little town some 20 miles North oi Sae. — 
I'olsom — (^Foolsom — in the barbarous ilialect oi the natives 
here — 1 don't know but the name is a feartul augury of my 
wisdom in going there.) (loes I thereinto a Bank — changing 
my delightful employment of peddling postage stamps {stomas — 
they eall 'em here) t'or (hat of buying gold dust from Mexicans, 
nigger Indians, and Chinamen, who are all great at the "sur- 
f.ue mining" in that vicinity. 

Calilornia (so far as that means the natural and not the 
human aspect thereof) is inexpressibly beautiful just now. I'he 
trees are all just "out," in (heir Spring vesture — the ("lelds full 
of (lowers — nobody has any right to talk about tields uir/>ctt\i 
with tlowers, till he has seen them here, (or, 1 suppose, in the 
.still more Tropical climates.) (.ireat gorgeous fellows, you 
know — like all the ciMiservatories you ever saw broken loose 
and romping over the wild plains here. exuUing and irrepressi- 



( 55 ) 

l)Ic. And iK)l only these supcil) sorts, hut rome to stoop down 
and look closer you find multitudes of the least wee blossoms — 
little stars, scarcely hif^ger than a pin's hcacJ, blue, and {)ure 
wliile, perfect as gems. — Only so for a couple of months or 
three months — then the parching, rainless summer bakes the 
ground, and browns the dry grass to a monotonous tint that 
makes one hot and thirsty even to look at it. 

And as with the vegetation, so with the children born here. . . . 
Little human blossoms, such as one rarely sees in the coh], 
Atlantic .states. Mites of girls, with complexions, like jKjrcelain 
which you look at the light through — and soft, beautiful eyes — 
And little boys, fair and delicate as girls — bright and gentle, 
but so fragile looking that it seems as though to speak suddenly 
to them would shock them out of existence. 'I'hey come 
around to my Post OiTic.o windows, toddling bits of creatures, 
asking for letters as sedate and grave as old men — and trotting 
off with them in their little hands, the letter almost as big as 
the sprite that carries it. — Whereat the clerk, Sill, pokes his 
head c(jnlcinplativcly through the window, and marvels at the 
climate which produces such things. 

¥r 

J'"()r,s()M, Jioic^ '6, J. 

lUisiness, as you know, T do not mightily enjoy. And here 
I am confined in the office from 6j/^ mornings, to ditto ditto at 
night. The evening, aye, being hallowed and glorified by a 
])iano, a good little library, and the conversation of people who 
et illi in Arcadia — i. c., have been to Yale (the caput familias 
at least has) or caught its spirit hereditarily. . . . 

'I'liere is one tiling in my circumstances here which you will 
rejoice mecum at — I am no longer wholly divorced from nnisic. 
I play the little hewgag in church, and get bites and si|)s at 
other music, from the i)iano. I suppose you have never known 
so complete a starvation from music as T have endured the last 



( 56 ) 

two years until now. Next to losing all love, it seems to me 
the greatest privation man is capable of suffering. 

No time to write now — I 'm standing at my desk, with the 
appurtenances of business hanging around me, like the shackles 
on a demd slave, the pen only caught from behind its accus- 
tomed nook, the ear, for a mere parenthesis of talk to you. I 
think if I could get away from counters and desks, into the 
woods somewhere, after my last 3 years' experience, I would 
be glad to do it — I wonder if somewhere in Maine there is not 
a cabin, deserted of its last hermit, under some big trees, with 
a cliff hanging over it, and a stream to catch one's daily meat 
out of — If so, it was built for me. 

July, '64. 
What I long after is a little leisure, either daily, weekly, or 
at least tri-yearly. — Do you get any ? and what do you do with 
it ? — How the world steals from us all that is valuable — our own 
time. It does seem abnormal that a human being for the poor 
privilege of living at all, should be obliged to give up all that 
makes (or might make — yes does make for thousands — I take 
back the foolish growl) life worth maintainmg. 

•X- -St 

I believe you say right about the comparative need of good 
women. — My dippings into Physiology etc. and Biography 
convince me that it is through the female that the race is kept 
up — merely generatively speaking. I mean — the male merely 
vivifies — It is the woman that is reproduced — In training a 
girl we are directing the course of all posterity in that line. We 



( 57 ) 

are not making an isolated statue, but a niotdd, for the mould- 
ing of many. 

There it is that every indentation and line tells toward "that 
serene result of all." 

* * 

Aug. last, '64. 

I am working very hard just now — at what (I never can 
shake off the feeling — the conviction — ) is unprofitable labor — 
mere business. 

How much weariness, etc., one can stand though, when it is 
known to be for a limited time. . . . Have n't you often been 
newly startled at the sudden realization of how much man owes 
to Hope? 

My great comfort is that man can't take his learning or his 
culture out of this life with him — Death pushes back everything 
from the gate except the naked soul. — Hence it don't much 
matter that one can't study, and know this or that. 

. . . I've been reading Theology lately. — You spoke of the 
legion of things which claim our attention — verily, verily. But 
moral philosophy stands first — then metaphysics — then down, 
to medicine, literature, sociology, zaAo logy, history, etc. — I keep 
a little fountain babbling and plashing in my brain, by reading, 
nearly every day, a word of Tennyson or Browning (Mrs. I 
mean) or Ruskin or Bible or somebody — I would like to take 
your arm and start on a trip through moral philosophy, by 
evenings, . . , 

I want to learn the organ when I come East. What will 
it cost me, besides time? It is in me if I do not get too 
old before it can come out. 



( 5S ) 

Aug. '65. 
People think that a thinking man's speculations about reli- 
gion etc. interfere with his daily life very little — but how cer- 
tain conclusions do take the shine out of one's existence ! 
These Spencer chai)s may be very excellent — but to me there 
is an apple of Sodom smack about it all — Little pigmies — what 
kind of babbling is this for worm-meat to emit ? " For man " 
(not even with a capital m) "is not as God" — And I more 
than suspect that the said worms lick their chops over the brain, 
as over the common tidbits of the grave. 

•H- 
■55- -Jt 

JVov. '65. 
You don't any longer need to tell me to enlarge my heart 
towards people. . . . Don't you know that I am superintend- 
ent of a Sunday School, and love the small people so that I 
could almost find it in me to stay here, and rot to death, to 
lead them a few steps higher than they can go by them- 
selves. . . . And that I ache with hunger to see the faces of 
my Beloveds, scattered and kept away even from my hope by 
those three beldames who sit aloft and spin — Well, thank the 
Lord, I believe in a power behind them, who marks out the 
pattern of the woof, though they do weave it of iron wire 
sometimes. 

Oakland, yioie '66. 
The more I write the less satisfied I am with any of my do- 
ings in poetry — verily, art is different from handicraft as 
(irimm says — only the perfect works ought to be given to the 
public — a bad boot or a tolerable article of cloth may be worth 
offering for sale — but when it comes to offering tolerable art — 
after Tennyson and the Brownings — 'twon't do — a poor devil 
ought to be hung for doing it — unless he be very poor, when 



( 59 ) 

his punishment might be commuted into imprisonment for life 
with only Tupper and the Country Parson for food and drink — 
in the way of stale toast or so. 

I'm reading Marx's Musical Composition, Ever read it? . . . 

You ask . . . what I — we — want to do when we get on 
there. ... I can't tell at all till I have got there, found how 
my health is going to be, how much chance of literary success 
there is for me, how much of musical. . . . 

I can't ever preach — that has slowly settled itself in spite of 
my reluctant hanging on to the doubt — I can't solve the prob- 
lems — only the great schoolmaster Death will ever take me 

through these higher mathematics of the religious principia 

this side of his schooling, in these primary grades, I never can 
preach. — I shall teach school, I suppose. 

Cambridge, Mass., Apr. 1867. 
I am enjoying my opportunities here hugely. They give me 
books and let me alone — what more could a man ask ? Be- 
sides some good lectures outside — Agassiz, etc. I went to a 
sacred concert last Sunday night in Music Hall. It was very 
fine — I don't know that I ever enjoyed music so much. Did n't 
hear the great organ though, so I am going over to hear that 
m an orchestral concert this p.m. Sunday night there was glo- 
rious orchestra music, and Arbuckle had a cornet arrangement 
of Adelaide with orchestra which nearly drew my heart out of 
my body. I have always raved about that song, but never 
heard it perfectly given before. What a splendor brass is 
when exquisitely played — How it winds and winds into one's 
very Ego, and tangles itself up with the emotions and passions 
and soars up with them. The wood sings all around one — the 
strings wail and implore fo us — but the brass enters in and 
carrie s one off bodily. Do you concur ? I want to hear that great 



( 6o ) 

organ — it was music only to look at it — a great, dark, shadowy 
cathedral looming up at the end of the immense Hall — Apollo 
Belvidere up in a niche opposite, looking scornful, as if to say 
that all that solemn, shadowy, bitter-sweet music — the heart- 
broken triumph — the fire of tears — is poor by the side of his 
memories of the Greek health and energy, and music that was 
sunshine dissolved in wine — But one looks back to the statue 
of the Master in front of the organ, and thinks the man is truer 
than the false god. 

Delightful spring weather — trees coming out — grass green. 
Nature is all under good subjection though about here — not 
even a Tutor's Lane to refresh the wild part of a man. 

Wisconsin gone for Woman's Suffrage ! . . . It's gay, is n't 
it — Massachusetts must hang her head and be second chop 
hereafter. 

* 

Cuyahoga Falls, ^ug., '67. 

I have determined not to return to Cambridge. There 
could be no pulpit for me after going through there (except as 
an independent self-supported minister, which of course is 
open to any one with a purse. ... I came reluctantly to that 
conclusion. Another person, even with my opinions in The- 
ology, might have judged differently, ... It is no sentimen- 
talism with me — it is simply a solemn conviction that a man 
must speak the truth as fast and as far as he knows it — truth to 
/liw — I may be in error — but what I beliri'e is my sacred truth, 
and must not be diluted. . . . When I get money enough to 
live on I mean to preach religion as I believe in it. Emerson 
could not preach, and now I understand why. 

So, the alternatives. 

School-teaching always has stood first. No decent salaries 
in this country. No freedom to follow my own way. No 
position available so far as I know. Hence, California . . . 



( 6i ) 



Ergo, some other business for the present, in this country. 
N. Y. as giving best salary, and society, and climate. 



* 
* * 



Brooklyn, Nov. '67. 

I came to N. Y. something over two months ago. . . . 
Found nothing better than helping edit a one-horse paper. 
Did it six weeks. Did n't suit, and was n't suited, and quit. 
Am now translating a German romance. ... It will take me 
six weeks or more. . . . 

What a horrid bilk New York is, speaking of bilks. And 
the way they brag here — Lord John of the East — you 'd think 
there was no other centre, and very little if any circumference- 
Fact is, they have so little conception here of the things there 
are to be known, that they easily believe they know it all. A 
man who never sees a tree, or a blade of grass, or a bit of sky, 
or stops still long enough to look down into another human 
being's eyes, — of course has no interrogation points awakened 
in him. He has learned to know the streets of the city — 
which he remembers being ignorant of when he came here — 
and he has learned the cheap conventionalities, which he 
blushed not to know, once — and there 's nothing else to learn, 
is there ? So he knows it all, does n't he ? and how he swells 
up and swaggers on the strength of it ! . . . I don't think a 
man needs any further provocation to cut his throat in simple 
moral nausea, than to walk up Broadway, and then down it on 
the other side, after he has got sufficiently used to the rattlete- 
bang to have his eyes about him, so as to examine the faces, 
expressions, of feature, gait, gesture, etc. . . . 



■5t * 



Cuyahoga Falls, June, 1868. 
When a man is actually living, he and Nature laying their 
heads together, and things occupying whole days, all this use of 



( 62 ) 

symbols of things — words — becomes a sort of mouldy amuse- 
ment, and my portfolio goes to sleep when I get into real 
out-door life. I never got so near to Nature as this year — that 
is, to homely Nature — not the sublime. I mean to the good 
old mother Nature of gardens and plowed fields and river and 
tame wood — the mistress sort of Nature I have had more to do 
with at some past times. 

So I have not written any poetry lately, but have had some 
real satisfactory thinks and good useful times. What fun it 
is to see one's muscle swelling up a little from pushing a plane 
and handling spade and hoe, and to feel one's backbone stif- 
fening up as by deposits of grit along the vertebras. And what 
a wholesome thing it is to plant one's foundation on the ground 
under an apple tree, and soberly think — while digging up the 
sod with a dull jack knife — how life is a pretty fair genial thing 
after all, and how happiness evidently is n't the only thing the 
gods consider good for man ; and how thoroughly it pays to 
try to keep healthy Uke the apple trees and the beasties and 
winds and soil — and kick pleasures to the Devil, and be sturdy 
and real. 

Of course one gets peevish and sentimental and sour and all 
other bad traits on him at times afterward, but he can look 
back for weeks to one thorough-going sensible forenoon, and 
bolster himself thereby. . . . 

It is a thousand pities that such fellows as you and I 
should n't be able to earn a decent living at some employment 
which would n't grind dreadfully. But what the Lord wants us 
to learn, I begin to suspect, is to grind — and that in the dread- 
fullest manner. . . . 

The fact is, we ought to have learned some one practical 
disagreeable trade — not profession, for it is better to be 
honest — (the laws of the Universe being as they are) . . . and 
we ought to have pitched into it as other people do — but this 
fair witch of poetry trips a man up. 



( 63 ) 

You say you 've got a dead book — So have I — Jolly, aint it ? 
I 'm content over mine, though, and was long ago. If my 
shoe-making does n't suit, the shoes must lie on the shelf till I 
learn the trade better — that 's all. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Sept., '69. 

I have commenced my school. Been running a week, 
" Central High School." 120 scholars. 2 lady ass'ts. Latin, 
Greek, Astronomy, Music, Philosophy, Physical Geog., 
Chemistry, etc., tapering down to infantry, under the ass'ts 
fresh from the swaddling clothes of the Intermediate and 
Primary Schools. I am " superintendent of schools," so my 
cares are many, as there are 4 primaries besides my own big 
school. So t/iaf's "what I am going to do next." . . . 

If , or any other very near-sighted scum-skimmer 

gives me any dabs that are good for anything to me, send me 
a copy, please. But otherwise, abuse is a mere nurse of un- 
profitable egotism. I don't mean to care whether any one 
thinks I can write well or ill, so long as I can teach a good 
school. . . . 

I am very busy, as I said. Plenty of time to have thoughts 
of my friends, as you know in your own case. 

•X- 

Dec, '69. 
More to do every day and night than I can find minutes and 
spinal column for. Comfortably off enough except for a thou- 
sand subjects to investigate and questions to be settled and no 
hour for them. I am forced to be occupied with details . . . 
yet chafed at the unsettled state of these confounded general 
principles. 

. . . Well, I suppose 't is a good deal illusion, these fine ideas 



( 64 ) 

of what we 'd do if something was n't just as it is. Blessed is he 
that wants things to be as he has 'em. But where is the man ? 

Jan., '70. 

I 'm not fitting very fast to be good in any one department 
of teaching. I am scattered all over my school here, and with 
128 scholars, and all manner of branches . . , you see how 
good a chance I have to be anything in particular . . . getting 
ray lessons for each day ahead, and not making any very prof- 
itable acquisitions, except perhaps about boy and girl nature 
in general. 

I would like to have a window opened through which I might 
get a draft of fresh communion with the lives of you folks 
there. . . . Strange that on such a great planet, alive with us, 
our thoughts and loves and sympathies should just cluster a half- 
dozen here and a half-dozen there, and count all the " world," 
so far as we care, on our fingers. 

I suppose we are reading the same telegraphic news, every 
day, and hearing the same topics talked, and the wives are 
playing the identical pieces on the pretty-much-identical pianos 
(only ours is out of tune at present) and so on. . . . 

Wherever I am, and however, I mean to try to do and be 
certain things (especially the doing ; for I find, looking at my 
life a week at a time, that has been the core, nowadays) but 
the where and how I leave till the last minute. So I know I 
am to be here till July next, and beyond that I don't look, ex- 
cept that your words about Oakland bring to mind vividly that 
't would be very pleasant to be there. 

June, 1870. 
Once in a while there seems to come a sort of eddy in the 
rush of my thoughts about my school, which leaves me to think 



( 65 ) 

of things in general, the future, etc. Such an one appears to 
have come this Sunday morning, perhaps in compensation for 
a night full of feverish dreams about classes and plans for 
scholars. And my eyes turn, first thing, of course, out your 
way; and the question is, can I manage it to come there? . . . 
I wish, if you get time to write me " so large a letter with 
your own hand" as I hope, you would put in a word or two 
on your religious status nowadays. We have both been think- 
ing, reading, etc., since a word has been said. For my part I 
long to " fall in " with somebody. This picket duty is monot- 
onous. I hanker after a shoulder on this side and the other. 
I can 't agree in belief (or expressed belief— Lord knows what 
the villains really think, at home) with the "Christian" people, 
nor in spirit with the Radicals etc. . . . Many, here and 
there, must be living the right way, doing their best, hearty 
souls, and I 'd like to go round the world for the next year and 
take tea with them in succession. Would n't you ? 

¥: 

Dec, 1870. 
If I were to commence any prose, for sample, I believe I 
would take up and recount the things that befell a man who 
had been so unfortunate as to inspire his friends, early in life, 
with great expectations of him. What woes it caused him and 
them, when they repeatedly touched him off as a rocket, and 
he infallibly came down like the stick. I suppose that if taken 
young and trained right I might have made a writer; but the 
training has certainly been wanting. I have got myself, by 
dint of nearly killing labor, into the shape of an almost tolera- 
ble schoolmaster, but higher than that I never shall get, till the 
resurrection. 



* 
* * 



( 66 ) 



[TO PUPILS: 1874-1883. ] 

Then, too, even if we should decide on service as the prin- 
cipal thing, the question arises : of what sort ? Shall it be like 
the washing of the feet, or the dying on the cross ? That is, — 
the small common helpfulnesses and services chiefly, or some 
special great absorbing service. Shall we let our lives run along 
in apparent insignificance, in channels others dig for them — 
mere irrigating trenches — or cut their own channel, under 
guidance of some idea of our own — great if possible, good cer- 
tainly, and at least our own. . . , Somebody wrote to me: 
" Why don't you stop trying to make something of other people, 
and make something of yourself?" Which will you do? 
They are hardly compatible. Supposing the same amount of 
good to others from either way, is there not an additional grain 
of good in the greater abnegation of self involved in the 
washing the feet theory? 

May one not look at it in this way: to be all we might in- 
cludes " character " as perhaps its highest part (considered in 
the light of immortality, as security for gains of all sorts in the 
future : as basis therefor, and essential condition : certainly the 
highest part): now it is so necessary to the highest character to 
serve others : to bear one's cross, as well as be lifted up on it : 
to renounce, for others' sake: that the gain is always more than 
the loss, even if we gave up ten years of study and thought to 
tend some bed-ridden cripple, whose highest want seemed only 
a cool cup of water now and then. 

Well, one thing is certain : we can seek the highest and best 
and truest we know : under guidance of half a dozen good mo- 
tives : no matter if they be inextricably mixed ; and no irre- 
parable loss if even some bad ones insist on mixing in with 
them. 



(67 ) 

Is it certain that the reason is in all ways higher than the 
emotions ? Perhaps they cannot be compared wisely : any more 
than a yard and a color. Love seems to me a pretty high 
thing. I suspect that to say a certain motive is based on love^ 
is not saying it is any lower than one based on logic. 

As Mr. says, one would n't like to have to choose 

whether he would prefer to have the oxygen or the nitrogen 
taken out of his atmosphere. 

We get a prejudice against the emotions, when we see them 
acting regardless of reason ; and against calculation, when it is 
cold and emotionless. How if they both go streaming in one 
current, like the light and the air? 

I like it that there are some subjects on which when one has 
said anything, he has after all said nothing at all. 

I hope you are not trying to do any brain-work. Let your 
brains vegetate and make new growth undisturbed, for next 
term — ! there 's so much I shall ask you to do. Mind you, I 
know about brains. The thing you want now till term opens 
is absolute stupidity, and great activity in the digestive appa- 
ratus. Horrid, is n't it ! Item, so much carbon, item, so much 
nitrogen: "five forms of protoplasm": muscular exercise to 
distribute them well about the tissues. Then next term, we 
will enter upon our birthright as "heirs of all the ages" and 
the "long result of time." 

Your question of 26th May was too good a one to leave so 
long unanswered. It was not left as being too hard to answer, 
but I have been very busy, and really could not find time to 
settle myself to say anything on so important a question till 
to-night, and now it must be a brief note. The real value of 



( 68 ) 

"being well read" seems to me to be in the wider and truer 
life it gives us. My "wider" 1 mean that our thoughts and 
feelings and purposes are more complex and more consonant 
with the complexity and manifoldness of the universe we live 
in : the microcosm gets a little — even if a very little — nearer 
in (luality and (juantity to the macrocosm. The crystal leads 
such a narrow life — just along one little line — a single law of 
facet and angle : the plant a little wider : — the fish a little 
wider : — and the different sorts of people widening and widen- 
ing out in their inner activities — and much according to their 
rcadini:; (since living human contact is not possible, except with 
the few relatives and neighbours). 

And by truer life, I mean truer to nature : more as we were 
meant to be : the inner relations, between ideas, corresponding 
closer to the ouler relations — or "real" relations — between 
things. These real thing-relations arc in fact \-ery complex and 
vastly inclusive : so must the thoughts and feelings be, if " true," 
or truly correspondent or mirror-like to them. 

I don't see that culture (unless you spell it wrong) needs — 
or lends at all — to cut one off from human warmth. Are not 
some of the " best read " people you know or hear of, some of 
the broadest-hearted also? The very essence of culture is 
sliaking off the nightmare of self-consciousness and self-absorp- 
tion and attaining a sort of Christian Nirvana — lost in the great 
whole of humanity : thinking of others, caring for others, admir- 
ing and loving others. 

I should like to have you write me more fully about it some 
time. 

If you have a shadow of suspicion that your own manner . . . 
may be at fault (or at misfortune) pray endeavor to change it. 
We must accommodate ourselves to the imperfect natures of 
people, just as they have-to to ours. No man can be just his 



( Cn; ) 

natural unrestrained self, without impinging too much. Angles 
collide with angles. «' Suspect yourself " is a great aid towards 
getting along with people. It 's the littleness of our natures 
that lets us stand on our rights so much as we constantly do. 
I suppose the great men stood chielly on their duties, instead. 
Ft ego have been knocked and rubbed a good deal ; but in the 
retrospect it seems to have been mainly my own fault or un- 
wisdom. Jesus would have - got along " pretty smoothly with 
nearly anybody. Iwen the whip in the temple is said to have 
been for the cattle, not their sellers. 

Of course charity is not to blind our judgment ; but only to 
enlighten it. I'.xempli gratia I have some little charity for the 
present Legislature. Nevertheless my judgment is that they 
are largely knaves and fools. Still, at this distance, I can rec- 
ognize most of them as fellow-critters. But what a mess they 
are making of educational matters. ... 

If you ever get thinking too much about yourself, and your 
own concerns, read King Lear, or As You Like It, or Llam- 
Ict : — taking the whole play at a sitting or two. 



•X- -X- 



You are getting on toward the close of the Second Act — the 
college days : and no doubt the management of the Third Act 
be</ins to occupy your mind a good deal -and perhaps to vex 
it a little What to do with one's life gets to be a large ques- 
tion toward the close of Senior Year. In my own, I was saved 
a part of the (luestion, for my health was frail and threatened 
me a little, so that the immediate duty was plain enough- to 
cut and run ; which I did, on a long sea voyage ; it was a toss- 
up which way it should be, among all the oceans and conti- 
nents, but it happened to be to California. I had pretty much 
determined that I would try to get a better aim than the com- 
mon ones " I could not hide that some had strwev^^ at least, 



( 70 ) 

whatever they had "attained." Egoism, pure and simple, had 
somehow always struck me — theoretically — as mighty paltry 
for a grown-up man ; a kind of permanent r///A/-condition. And 
I cast about for some way of combining service with bread and 
butter. The ministry, or teaching, I finally settled it must be 
for me. It was a little narrow ... to confine the choice to 
those two. I can see now that there are lots of ways to serve 
— more even than ways to get bread and butter. . . . 

I . . . took a saddle-horse, rode about the country and 
hunted up a locality I liked the looks of, with a clean little 
school-house and wholesome looking farm people about it, and 
taught that country school. I found there was no ditificulty in 
doing it, after a fashion at least ; so I kept on. . . . 

One thing is clear : a year or two of teaching is good honest 
work for any one — an advantage to others, and to self (for 
others in the future), as well. But if you knew you should 
then go into medicine, I think I should not wait but go into it 
at once. You may think medicine ministers only to the body — 
but, I. the body is necessary condition of higher things, and 
2. a good physician finds himself in one of the most influential 
positions in the community, for good. Nor need his work be 
confined to his lancet and pill-boxes (though there 's a noble- 
ness about those, when you think of the relations of mind and 
body), but there is an endless range of studies, and j)erhaps of 
writing, possible to such a profession. 

One thing we must try to realize. Our individual drop of 
force is only one in a great sea. Perhaps, even if we saw just 
what particular piece of work the world most needed, we 
should not be the man for it. I see a number of things that 
need tremendously to be done; but / can't do them. I was n't 
properly endowed, or I had n't, and could n't have got, the 
training for it. Meantime I do what my hand finds to do and 
try not to fret. . . . Anyway, the thing is, not to spoil too 
much time and brains trying to be sure of the absolutely best 



( 71 ) 

work — but to use all reasonable effort to see, and then — 
even if in vexatious doubt — to strike into the mosX. probably 
sensible course, and work like a locomotive. One can at least 
fix his course for a year ahead — and agree with his con- 
science to let him alone to work at that /<?r the year. And so 
year by year, if no other way is possible to one's temperament, 
one can get through a fine stent of work in a lifetime. 

■X- ¥: 

Your letter I was very glad to get. The rain meantime is 
over and the sun is out (on one side of the bay) and the linnets 
are crazy about it, turning my peas into music very success- 
fully. — I like your ideas about specialties. Literature, for that 
matter, gets to be .a specialty even if you don't take it for that, 
and your other works and aims would n't interfere with it, but 
leave it all the healthier. I should be almost afraid of a spe- 
cialty (early chosen) of literature : lest it get mechanical and 
bread and buttery. I never made it a specialty and hardly do 
even now. I should rather say that teaching (in general) was 
my chosen specialty (however ill followed) and literature a field 
of flowers and grain and birds in which I and my pupils dis- 
port ourselves meantime. 

■X- 
* -X- 

It is a pity that in making plans, etc., one has to think so 
much about one's self. Beware, my dear child, of too much — 
or too exclusive — interest in yourself, and your own inner ex- 
periences. Make sensible plans for yourself, and then go at 
their fulfillment, forgetting yourself (one can, since all plans 
are for work of some kind, and that may all be from within 
outward. Even reading and study and thought and writing — 
are so.) Have you read Spencer's Ethics? Better do so. 
(Did you read Emerson on the Sovereignty of Ethics in N. A. 



( 72 ) 

Rev., May, '77 ?) Spencer has a very sharp passage on Car- 
lyle, but who has expressed the protest against egoism so 
well — so " very salt and bitter and good " — as he in the Second 
Part of Sartor Resartus (that part — the autobiographical part 
[though he pretends it is not auto-] — is worth reading over, if 
you have n't lately.) 

Here are a few points of advice from a veteran, which I wish 
you not only to read, but to solemnly adhere to: 

1. Don't care in the faintest possible degree what the chil- 
dren think of your doings. (You may think as much as you 
please of what they care for. They have tender little hearts.) 

2. Don't try to do (or have them) two day's works in one. 
Little by little, and the least things first, and many times 
repeated. 

3. Their education consists mainly in their working: not 
yours. Sometimes the teachers that work hardest do the 
poorest work, on that very account. (Your work otit of school, 
of course helps them : but I mean, in.) 

4. If you find yourself getting excited, or talking loud, or 
moving quickly (i. e. hurriedly) just stop, and let the steam go 
down. Give the children something to do quietly, as a com- 
position on "What I should like to have " or something, mean- 
time. 

5. Go to bed early, after giving yourself a rubbing, to get 
the blood out of your brain into your skin and muscles. 

6. Keep warm: every minute, day and night. Be sure 
you are clothed warmly enough for that climate, especially 
when winter comes. 

7. 8, 9, and 10. Never allow yourself to think of what you 
have been doing; during the day, for instance. It is the going 
over things in the head afterwards, that kills. Throw your 
mind off from a thing, when it is done, and look only for- 



( 73 ) 

ward, planning the next thing. At night, for example, think 
about the next day's work, not the past one. This rule is 
worth everything. 

You will feel queer perhaps for a day or two or three, but 
will soon like it and enjoy yourself. 

Truly it would be pleasanter for you to be teaching with 
me . . . but perhaps not so good for you, after all. That 
which teaches us most, is the best for us. I often wish, my- 
self, that I were in some " loveliest village of the vale," with an 
old wooden schoolhouse and a parcel of barefoot urchins; with 
a little stream to fish in, and a long meadow to see sunsets 
from, and a little old church where I might hear a country 
choir and doze o' summer afternoons. But better not. And 
so with you. ... 

It is good, also, to be alone for a while. That 's the bitter- 
est medicine one ever has to take, but we need it. So peg 
away at the small duties of these days. A good many of us 
have had very similar experiences, translated into different 
languages of circumstances and particular individuals, but the 
same in purport. ... 

Don't let any more of the molehills seem mountains than 
you can help. " ^Vho cares ? " is a good nightcap. 

Think how dreadful it must be to be such people as we wot 
of. What is anything they can do to others, compared with 
thatl 






Your letter of 20th was received yesterday, on my return 
from a horseback ride with Mr. McLean, up through Napa 
and Sonoma. I sent you a paper from Napa, by the way . . . 
it contains a couple of spirited pictures. Don't you like those 



( 74) 

frogs, with the moonshine on their sHppery legs? and the wal- 
rus picture is good. I think I should quietly substitute any 
such for the villainous ones which may be among those you 
speak of on the walls. I used to put up newspaper pictures on 
my schoolhouse walls, for lack of finer ones. Children absorb 
so much through the eye. . . . 

You are right about the geography class. Give them all the 
physical, I should say together. Skip much of the other geo- 
graphy, having them learn only the principal things, and those 
with great thoroughness. Outline map recitations : pointing 
to rivers, great cities, etc., and stimulating them (a large class 
of mixed grades can do it) to quick accurate answers — the best 
thing. , . . Get the class to take an imaginary voyage with 
you down a river, or along a coast, or so forth (in a balloon 
over a country, say.) Then each in turn describes what they see. 
Play we have come to such and such a town : what costumes: 
"exports": trees and plants : climate, etc. . . . 

You will get along very well, I think, with your little flock. 
Y'r big boys won't trouble you much. If either of them 
should, be firm as a rock. He must do as you say, or leave. 
You must remember that you are not only hired by that dees- 
trick, but by the State of California. . . . You have the 
Governor and Supreme Court and Legislature at your back for 
support, provided you do just right. . . . But I 've no idea 
they will offend. They are coarse enough, no doubt; but a 
good deal of it is superficial. At heart they have good about 
them. Every one had a mother. Half of these students are just 
as bad, under the surface. You or I are bad enough, if it 
comes to that. We must n't be squeamish : physicians (moral 
and mental, as well as physical) have to stand some things that 
are offensive. You must take things right by the horns. Don't 
allow anything bad for fear of speaking of it. Take your sin- 
ners one by one, however. Never chide in public if you can 
help it. . . . See the good in your children, all you can. 



( 75 ) 



■5t 



I am very glad you have the lovely things to look at, in 
sky and mountain. We could hardly get on otherwise. 
With those, and a few human beings whom we believe in and 
can trust, and these both as prophetic intimations of something 
beyond, higher than either — we can do very well — even if 
they fry the steak, and the grammar class seems -avra zovj?, 
Tzavra uu3ev. 



I wish I could help you in some way. I can only send my 
sympathy, and urge you to do all you can for the children, re- 
gardless of their defects of breeding, the disagreeablenesses of 
their parentage, etc. ... If you can help one or two of them 
ever so little: or even make them happier — the cup of cold 
water, you know: there is a good deal in that. 

■Jfr 45- 

You should be writing a good deal, in odd moments. Send 
me anything that 's good — after it gets cold : — so that you 
need n't feel that it 's goifig to be sent while writing; for what 
we all need is to keep clear of restraining influences — these ob- 
scure, subtle ones, — that throw us out of rapport with ourselves, 
and make us think of the writing instead of the thing to be 
written. I believe we could all of us write something worth 
while if we could get free from everything but the looking 
clearly at the inner thing we are trying (or should be) to 
transcribe. 

If your brain wheels will run on . . . give them some good 
important grist to grind ; as, a new book — or a bit of natural 



( 76 ) 

science (natural science is a good healthy inanity to relieve the 
brain with, any time), or some French (e. g. Katia, a Russian 
story, by Tolstoi, translated into French). Take this rule for 
yourself: — think of the largest things (among all that 
come through your brain, hour by hour) and those that have 
the least reference to yourself. You 'd much better be think- 
ing about the explorations in Assyria, and act in your personal 
affairs from momentary common sense and instinct — than to 
neglect all those world-interests and be planning or reminiscing 
about some small personal relation or piece of conduct — which 
does n't make much difference, anyhow. 



Berkeley, Nov., 1876. 

. . . Now I want to ask a favor. At the meeting of the 
State Teachers' Association in San Francisco a few months ago, 
a committee was appointed to enquire into industrial schools 
and colleges, etc.: to report at next meeting, which will be dur- 
ing session of next Legislature. I am not on that committee, 
but I am convinced that unless I stir about for facts . . . the re- 
port will be all o' one side like the handle of other teapots. . . . 

Now will you keep a little bit of a corner in some out of the 
way rubbishy part of your brain (if you have any such, which 
to be sure I doubt) for any facts or memoranda of good places 
to get 'em, to strengthen our hands ? . . . 

I know you must be crowded with nearer calls, but I know, 
too, that your minutes all go to some direction of civilization 
or other, and maybe we might as well try to steal a few of 
them for the benefit of our barbarous shores. 



( 77 ) 

May, '77. 

Your package of books for the Students' Library is re- 
ceived. ... It has excited considerable enthusiasm in the 
students that one of the great pubHshers in New York should 
send such a gift. I think it has had some result on their views 
of human nature, as well as prospective scholarly result. If 
you know what my notions of teaching are, you will understand 
what place books for the student hold in my views of the Uni- 
verse. It is my hobby that the best education you can give a 
young fellow (if not about the only education) is to bring his 
mind in real contact with the best other minds. My labor 
goes in that direction : selecting with (I hope) constantly better 
discrimination the best things, and the best parts of the best, 
and contriving new ways to get the boys the power and the 
desire and the opportunity to assimilate them : to " get out- 
side " of them. . . . 

"Who would have thought, that night when we were sleepily 
talking about the future, in bed in your room in New Haven, 
in i860, that 17 years after (what a distance that seemed 
then !) I was to be hammering at the young brains in these 
longitudes, and you were to be sending out a lot of steam- 
power to keep the hammer going. The whirligig brings round 
lots of things besides revenges. 

What a surprise it will be a thousand years hence if we 
happen to be doing similar things. 

Sept. '78. 
As to the wee bit bookie, I have pondered, and more than 
than that have (for the first time in six years) looked over the 
volume. If I were to get it out again it would be with just half 
the things out, and just about as much put in in their place (from 
magazines, etc.) But this I am not anxious to do : for while 



( 78) 

there is a little demand (as I hear constantly from our book- 
sellers hereabouts) for a new edition, I look upon it as a de- 
mand not for the poetry but for the Professor's poetry. That 
is, you understand, not a legitimate demand. The poetry, if 
good for anything, ought to make me in demand, not I the 
poetry. 

I am getting on well enough, considering what planet we are 
on. ... I am still trying with considerable energy each day 
(which gives out toward night, I confess) to see what is good 
and valuable in English (and other peoples') literature. The 
more I look the less I find, but the more I prize what little I 
do find. 

I should like to make a prose book or two for you to publish, 
but I shall not live long enough to do it, nor will you ever be 
likely to be rich enough to afford to publish the sort of books I 
should write. 

Feb., i8So. 

Thank you for the information for my inquiring student. . . . 
I knew about the Social Science Associations, but my point was 
that they don't go to the bottom-difficulty: viz., what end are 
we at"ter ? And secondly, is it the end we had better be after. 
My notion is that Spencer is the only man that has begun to 
answer that question — namely in the Data — and in previous 
hints which he that did n't run too fast might read — and that 
the Associations have been puttering about Contagious Dis- 
eases, Drainage, Prison Reform, and other such excellent 
matters to work at, but the perfection of which would leave us 
very little better off than at present. The best thing you can 
do with such people as we have now is to let the contagious 
diseases thin 'em out a little, perhaps. 

As to your thought that I have scattered, and ought to make 
myself "favorably known." My dear fellow, I like your caring 
for me enough to say this and wish this, but — if you knew 



( 79 ) 

about my life of late years and my ideas of life, you would see. 
I am not and have n't been trying to make myself favorably 
known. The devil take any one that is trying for it. I have 
been working to educate, in some high sense, successive classes 
of young people; and meanwhile to know more about educa- 
tion, and especially literature as a means of it, and about educa- 
tion in its relation to society and life. I am contented to die un- 
known, if I can arrive at the truth about certain great matters, 
and can put others in the way thereof. If there is anything 
which utterly disgusts me and makes me howl aloud and swear, 
it is these infernal fools who are fighting to get their names 
abroad, and care for no other work. That a man like Spencer 
should be well known is a matter of course and all right ; but 
he has not cared for that. Let a man work his work in peace, 
and the devil take his name — the less likely to get anything 
more of him than that. 

NmK, '80. 

I want to get into communication with somebody in England 
who knows (or cares) about public education there. I want to 
ask a lot of questions and get some documents. Can you tell 
me to whom to write ? I feel a tremendous desire to get light 
on educational matters outside of our little pint-pot here in Cal- 
ifornia. E. g. I " want to know you know " about certain text 
books, (for the lower schools). And to look after certain 
. statistics. 

My hobby just now is the High School question. We are 
having meetings of High School and College men to try to be 
mutually helpful and cooperative. But the bones are mostly 
pretty dry bones as yet. . . . 

We have always been hearing about the German schools and 
Univ^- I am more and more coming to think it is the English 
schools we want to know about, and Univ^, judging by results 
in producing thoroughly civilized men. 



(8o) 

■X- 

Dec, 1880. 
Your letter with suggestion of P^nglish school me"n was re- 
ceived. Thank you. I have tried the M. Arnold : will let you 
know the result if any. I am making a list of books to rec- 
ommend for our pub. school libraries. If you know of any list 
made by any competent hands I wish you 'd tell me. ... I 
would give a good deal for a really well chosen list of a hundred 
volumes for girls' and boys' reading. But how to get it? 
Meantime I set down old folks' books, mainly, as the best 
boys' reading I know of. But there must be some good "juve- 
niles," if anybody knows them. 

Dec, 1880. 

I have got to the point where I again like and enjoy poetry, 
after a period of fearing I had lost that source of pleasure. 
Perhaps I shall get still farther to the point of trying again to 
write some. You see I had to read such acres of poor verse 
(it is right, is n't it, to measure it by acres — superficial meas- 
ure) in my professional work, that I came to dislike it. Now 
I have done all that — the old poets, you know — once for 
all, — and can enjoy, and preach, the few good poets. . . . 

I am making out a list of books to recommend for public 
school libraries. Do you know of any list that will help me ? 
This book of Putnam's — Hints for Home Reading — with its 
Joseph Cookery and lists — is a poor affair. I '11 bless you if 
you can send me any suggestion. 

Hi 

Feb., '81. 
You think I write on various subjects. No. Only on Edu- 
cation (which is my hobby) and in Literature, with an occa- 
sional wild excursion into Sociology. I take a great and 



( 8i ) 

growing interest in being the cause of writing in others. Have 
trained up already two " Atlantic " writers and various smaller 
fry, I like to help at the incubation of poets, especially. 

Geneva, Switzerland, Sep., 1881. 

I was thinking this morning, as I lay waiting for it to be 
time to get up (and waiting — also — for the clouds to clear 
away from Mont Blanc, so that I could see it better from the 
window) about the difficulties that beset writing under a// cir- 
cumstances. It is easy to see why so few good or valuable 
books have been written. The wonder is that any one ever 
surmounts the obstacles, and gets anything accomplished be- 
yond p/ans. I was wondering, also, whether you are doing 
anything with the pen. Remember the Statue and the Bust. 

These Alps are very near kin to our Sierras : more pictur- 
esque, more full of surprises, more to the painter's hand per- 
haps; but hardly more beautiful or impressive — except a few 
regions, as that of Mont Blanc, the like of which I have not 
seen. . . . 

What a long time it takes the mail to crawl around such a 
little pocket planet. 

Ambleside, Westmoreland, Sep., '81. 
This violet is a descendant of the one Wordsworth is always 
writing about. At least I picked it to-day on the side of the 
path where he must have walked many times, between his 
house and Stock Ghyll Force, It is a beautiful region, this of 
the English Lakes ; but one does n't see, after all, why poetry 

should not be thought and felt and written as well at or 

Berkeley, as in Westmoreland. 

•55- 



( ^^-' ) 

Baltimore, Oct. 'Sr. 
I am vetv sorry to hoar of Mr. Lanier's death. His book on 
English verse is the only thing extant on that subject that is of 
any earthly value. I wonder that so tew seem to have discov"^' 
its great merit. 

Berkki Kv, XiK'., 'Si. 

Do you know of any college in good standing that gives the 
degree of A. B. without Latin and C>reek, or without Cireek? 
What colleges give A. M. without Lat. or (.ireek (aside from 
complimentary degrees). If I understand aright »<>« give A. B, 
for certain courses which may not include (.ireek. And why 
not? //"a course is contrived with stutT in it equivalent. 

Our new Lresident is about announcing a course in "Science 
and Letters." which is to be a "liberal education" for business 
men. 1 tell him — as about the old " Strawberry " — there m^fit 
be made a course, perhaps, — and may perhaps in the future — 
which shall give a ''liberal ed." without Latin: but who has 
seen such an one as yet invented, or any certain prv^duct 
thereof? 1 for my part am unwilling to have much to do with 
— or to be responsible at all for — any regular college course, 
with a degree, which is not icorthy, at least, of A. B.: or et-iuiv- 
alent thereto. 1 am willing to lecture to teachers and others on 
literature, etc., and do do it : but I don't believe a "college" 
ought to give a regular four years curriculum and give a degav 
at the end of it, unless there is good substantial stuff in it, 
enough to make a rich and trained mind. 

... A rernarkable state of things in the old town. No 
wonder vour cousin's interest goes back to the gravestone 
j^HK^ple — they u'crc s;\ne. once, anyhow. It would do those 



( S3 ) 

old towns good to seize hold of them (by the handle of a 
steeple or two) and haul 'em up and sprinkle the people out as 
from a pepper-box all over this Western region — collecting 
'em all again after a couple of years and putting 'em back with 
a teaspoon. . . . 

"Yet spite of all" their going insane 
IVl like to he with 'em (geographically) and remain — 

for a while at least. 

■X- 

July, iSS-. 



TO R. E, C. S. HORTATORY. 

"Come hack, my children," arid Berkeley cries. 
Come to my leathery gum trees' hluish shade, 
Come where my stuhhly hillside slowly dries, 
And fond adhesive tarweeds gently fade. 

Here murmurs soft the locomotive's shriek. 
And o'er the plain the antic dummy squeals, 

Here picnic eggshells hloom beside the creek. 
That sweetly 'mid its dried-up hummocks steals. 

At morning howls the neighbor's pensive dog. 
At noon the flower-beds don their stony crust. 

At evening softly falls the genial fog. 
And every hour bestows its bounteous dust. 

Come — when you 've got to, not a day before ! 

Till then, stay there, and heed not Berkeley's lures. 
Drink health and blessing from the mountain's store, 

And still, dear Stearns, believe me 

Ever yours. 

Oct., 'S2. 
I have seen the comet twice: the first time just as you did, 
with the little moon, and trees against the white dawn : won- 
derful. This morning without the moon : the dawn white in the 
east, and ruddy in the southeast. The stars oil visible, though, 



( S4 ) 

and one shining clear right through the tail, increasing the 
gauziness of the effect. It is like a phantom, anyway, the 
whole affiiir : the spirit of a world, hovering about and waiting 
to be incarnated. 



[1883.] 



Cuyahoga Falls, Jan. 25, 'S3. 
We made a comfortable and safe journey across. It 's 
mighty cold hereabouts, mercury sticking close to zero, day 
and night. But there 's no harm in it. 

* 

Zero weather. Snow creaks and crackles under foot. Two 
people cross a carpet and give a sharp spark to one another's 
noses. Went skating yesterday. Didn't "cut across the 
shadow of a star" because it was daylight, and besides the 
critics say it can't be done. "Shadow''? No: what is it? 
"Reflex"? "Sparkle"? 

A white world, with skeleton trees — nervous systems anato- 
mized and set up in the air, frozen stiff — is a queer thing: 
unearthly. 

It 's a bad time to take up trees in the winter ; ground is 
frozen ; roots can't go down. This is a parable. If it were 
summer here, no doubt I should be taking long walks and going 
fishing, and mooning about, nights — and keeping my old en- 



( S5 ) 

vironment out of my head as thoroughly as possible. But it 's 
winter — the dead vast and middle of it (as Howell quotes of 
the summer) — and my roots are all in the air as yet, and I feel 
extremely queer. We are supposed to have got settled. , . . 
I have established a writing-table with the birds contiguous (as 
near a window as I dare put 'em for fear of freezing their noses 
off: you remember how the cold air pierces in between the 
sashes of a window like a long thin knife?) . . . They manage 
to have some green leaves and posies under a glass — but what 
looking gardens ! They were spaded in the Fall, so that when 
not mercifully veiled with snow they look all lumpy mud, frozen. 
Gracious ! what a looking world. 

I am supposed to be entered on a mad career of literary 
work. Have so far only written some very mild verses — suit- 
able for nursery use in some amiable but weak-minded family. 
But then I 've been skating twice ! Think of that — real ice, too. 

You can make Mr. feel bad about that, if you tell him — 

and make him think he 'd like to be here ; but he would n't. 

It 's a curious illusion of yours out there, that you can go 
out and pick tlowers and hear leaves rustle and see grass grow 
and feel thorough-going sunshine. You can't, you know, 'cause 
it "s winter everywhere : snow and ice, or frozen slush and mud 
— it must be. / used to have that same hallucination when I 
was out there. Queer. Effect of the climate, I s'pose. 



Thank you very much for keeping me so thoroughly posted. 
I feel as if there was nothing /lere to keep you posted cihuf. 
There 's nothing here anyway except weather. Some it is fluicW 
and some it is frozen, and eke sometimes the mixture yclept 
slush — but always weather. We sit down at breakfast and 
discuss the prospects of the day as to — weather. We report 
to each other the observations each has made casually during 



( 86 ) 

the night as to — weather. Some one tells how the barometer 
stands, and what it has done during the night. Some one else 
reports the direction of the wind — this is disputed by some 
one else. After breakfast the first one out-doors comes back 
and reports on — the weather. During the forenoon any member 
of the family who falls in with any other reports the thermome- 
ter or the barometer, and they stop their respective businesses 
a few moments to discuss the weather. At dinner there is a 
whole forenoon's weather to discourse upon, and various pro- 
phetic intimations concerning the afternoon weather. At tea, 
the day's weather furnishes the piece of resistance, with entrees 
of conjecture as to the morrow's prospects. You do not buy 
anything at the stores till you have compared views on this 
subject. Then you buy, and before you can get your change 
(cents, you know, carefully counted) you must disclose your 
innermost and private views concerning not only to-day's 
weather, but yesterday's, and that of the season in general. 
You also give your views briefly, before you get to the door, 
on the weather of Ohio compared with that of the Pacific Slope. 
Then you hastily make a pacific slope out of the door. 

When you get home you find you have constantly received 
cents, and failed to pay out any — so that your purse is all 
stuffy with 'em. But you have no time to deplore this, for 
some one distracts your attention at once to the weather. 

Antiochus Epiphanes has been allowed to thaw out a little 
here lately. Thereby changing the world trom a dead white to a 
whitey-brown or mud-and-dead-grass color. But just now it 
has lightly frozen again, and the puddles are skimmed with the 
"frolic architecture" of the ice, and the air is fine and dry. . . . 

The air here makes a man feel like stirring around livel)'. 
Sets vour feet to walking you otT indefinite distances. But 



( 87 ) 

there 's no splendid Berkeley view to behold when you get to 
the end of your walk. We can't have everything in one spot. 
What 's the use of crying for the moon? Better flatten one's 
nose on the pane and gaze upon it and try to be glad he 
has n't got it. Should have to take care of it and pay taxes on 
it if we had it. 

■H- 

■X- * 

I am and shall be interested in all California goings on, for 
I am glad to accept the axiom some one has quoted to me, 
«' Once a Californian, always a Californian." We may be forced 
to blush sometimes for our politicians out there, but our Bay 
civilization is a thing to be congratulated on. . . . 

•5fr 
¥: ^ 

Spring just faintly appearing here — snubbed by a snow- 
storm every few days. No leaves out, but robins and blue- 
birds, and buds swelling. 

* 

" Summer is a cumin in. Loudly sings cucku " — that is to 
say, the wobbin, and the gluebird, and the noriole. It is So°— 
warm, and a thunder storm night before last, and crocuses and 
jonquils and hyacinths and primroses are in bloom in the gar- 
dens, and hepaticas and anemones, as well as arbutus, in the 
woods. But there is not enough oxygen in the warm south 
wind. It is a very soft and musical wind in the blossomed 
elms and maples, and just beginning to be scented with cherry 
blossoms — but it lacks the oxygen of the sea breeze. Funny 
old world ! Where there are lovely things to see in the country 
the air tries to prevent your having the energy of a dormouse, 
to 20 out to walk and see them. Where the air is bracing 



( 88 ) 

there 's nothing much to go out for to see. Evidently a world 
not meant to make its denizens perfectly contented. The duty 
of not being contented ! what an easy duty ! 

* 

Windsor, Conn. 

I have been making a pilgrimage to E to-day. ... It 

has been, to begin with, a perfect June day, and you remember 
the look of it in these regions : the blue sky with white dapples 
in it, the lustrous leaves not yet long enough out of their sheaths 
to have lost their tender new green, the fields full of daisies 
(too full, the honest farmer would say — but not too full for 
the passing vagabones to enjoy), the laurel glimmering in the 
woods (remember it?), the roads as they run through thickety 
places full of the smell of wild grape blossoms (remember 'em ?), 
the rye soft and wavy (nothing but rye in the sandy plains 

betwixt here and E , or a little tobacco and spindly corn — 

plain living and high thinking must be the rule out around 
there among the farmers. . . . 

E is beautiful. It might be just a little quiet in the 

winter, for gay people like you . . . but at this season it is 
great. There 's a glorious silence there. I saw a man, and a 
boy with a toy wagon, and another man, all on the street at 
once. But they went into dooryards and were seen no more. 
What a dignity and placid reserve about the place ! The 
houses all look like the country-seats of persons of great re- 
spectability who had retired on a competence — and retired a 
great ways while they were about it. And what big houses 
they used to build. Used to, I say, because there is n't a 
house over there that looks less than a thousand years old : 
not that they look old as seeming worn or rickety at all, but 
old as being very stately and wise and imperturbable. I am 
struck, all about here in Conn., with the well kept up look of 
the houses. Paint must be cheap — no, 'tis n't that. Paint is 



( S9 ) 

probably pretty dear ; but they believe in keeping everything 
slicked up. Yet there are a few oldest of the old houses that 
came out of the ark I know. 

■5fr 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. 
I have myself just " lit " from a flight among Eastern 
places. Have been gone about two months : the old habit, 
you see, of getting away for summer vacation. No moun- 
tains, to be sure, to flee to, but the ^\^lite /////^ are considered 
and believed to be Mts. in New England, and I would not 
cruelly undeceive them there. I called them mts. whenever I 
could think of it — especially Mt. Washington, which really is 
a very pretty piece of rising ground : specially at sunset when 
it "wraps the drapery of its" cloud-shadows and ridge-shadows 
about it, and gets rosy on top. ... I had a few days in New 
York : found it as of old ( — and more than of old, a good 
deal — ) a splendid city: nothing in Europe handsomer or 
gayer than 5th Avenue of an afternoon, or by electric light in 
the evening. But I rather hated it, except as a wonderful 
show, and got out of it quickly to old Windsor, which is sleepier 
than ever: lovely old place though — "home of perpetual 
peace." 

•X- 

It is a generous soul that writes without reference to accu- 
rate tally of give and get. You and are about the only 

ones among my friends that will do it. Why should n't we ? 
Are we bound by the slaveries that women submit to, with 
their double entry (front entry and back entry) book-keeping 
of social "calls" (hence the phrase, the "call of duty" ?) Poo' 
women ! Who would be thou ! 



( 90 ) 

I am just back from a summering in the ancient and som- 
nolent pastures of New England : some weeks at my old honie, 
Windsor, in the Conn. River valley — you remember how 
green and peaceful that region is, corn-fields and hay-fields, 
and elm-shaded streets and maple-shaded houses (with green 
blinds, mostly shut tight), and patches of their pretty woods 
— the trees only shrubs to a Californian eye, but ever so fresh 
and graceful, and lustrous with rain or dew : a week in the 
White Mts. — they, too, dwarf varieties, but capable of good 
coloring and various picturesque " effects " : and a few days 
on the Maine sea-shore. 

No discount on the Atlantic Ocean, The only thing East 
that does n't seem like a feeble imitation, after living so long in 
California. (I hardly except the people as to certain charac- 
teristics. . • .) 

It is an evidence of the irrational attachment one gets (as 
cats do) to places, that the Berkeley post-mark (which the 

good Dr. makes very conscientiously: ex pede Herculem, 

the mark of a careful and just man) gives me always a pleasant 
little twinge of homesickness. It is an evidence of the somewhat 
more rational attachment we get to people, that your hand- 
writing does likewise, only more so. . . . 

We are having hot, moist, muggy summer weather. We live 
on the recollections of the Maine Coast and the ^^'llite Mts. 
It is pleasant to know that there it does n't rain hot water. 
Once in a while I reflect, also, with pleasure, that you in 
Berkeley are cool and vigorous and chipper, while we are being 
parboiled. But there are beautiful things to behold here on 
these summer mornings, and glorious summer nights. We 
have moonlight here. The full moon is a ripper, I tell you. 
Great on a row of maples — big fellows — with shade deep and 
black. — I hope Mr. Crane is all right again. 



( 91 ) 






Yours of 4th was received yesterday, and papers containing 
the same sad news of Mr. Crane's death. I had heard that he 
was seriously ill, but afterward that he was supposed to be out 
of danger ; so that I was greatly surprised when the news came. 
Somehow he seemed a man that would not die : there seemed 
such an amount of quick, active life in him. I always thought 
of him as so thoroughly alive. He always came to my recol- 
lection as he looked when speaking in the Club — perfectly 
quiet in manner and tone, but every fibre of his brain evidently 
electric. I had written him a letter a few weeks ago, from an 
impulse to tell him how well I appreciated him and liked him. 
I am specially glad now that I did. Another evidence that a 
man had better always follow his first impulse. . . . And it 
[his mind] was kept clear and reinforced all the time by an in- 
tegrity of intellect that made him look first of all to see what 
was true. Other men were after the right sound, or the prudent 
word, or the polite one, or the amiable one, or one that would 
stop a gap when ideas were wanting. He was after the exact 
and unadulterated /«^/. And my brain was actually in love with 
his, ever since I first knew him. 

Personally he never in the least warmed toward me ; but I 
never in the least looked for that. One of the things that made 
me like him was that I seemed to see that he divined my own 
limitations, and weighed me pretty accurately. I admired him 
the more from the fact that he did not at all admire me,* and 
I liked him the more from the fact that his intellectual honesty 
seemed to do justice to mine — a thing which from boyhood has 
been a permanent craving with me. Well, I did n't expect him 
to die, and I am mighty sorry to lose him from this world. Yes, 
he is one of the men that help one to believe in the immortality 
of the soul. I think Crane — the real man — must be, some- 
where, to-day, just as truly as he was a month ago. 

* In fact, Mr. Crane cherished a peculiar admiration for Professor Sill. 



( 92 ) 

I 've just finished a paper on the co-education question (you 
see how the public, at last, has got excited about that? Oh, 
they will get the old fogy colleges into it, yet) which I shall 
maybe send to some magazine. The trouble is, nobody agrees 
with anything he reads unless he agreed with it beforehand — 
so what 's the use? I don't believe a man was ever convinced 
of anything since Adam. People blunder into opinions some- 
how, and then stick to 'em. 

I'll tell you what you are sure to enjoy reading — Jane 
Welch's letters. I was reading a book about Rossetti t'other 
day, in which he is quoted as saying she was a "bitter little 
woman" — but she probably snubbed him and thought small 
beer of his brass crucifixes and aesthetic flummeries. She was 
a cracker at letter writing, anyway. And she must (from his 
own account of it) have suffered no end from Carlyle's dread- 
ful ways. She says in one letter to him "it would never do for 
me to leave you for good [I infer she had really considered that 
question] for I should have to go back the next day to see how 
you were taking it"! — I wish I could step into my neighbours 
there to see how you are taking it. Bet you have forgotten 
where we lived and how I spell my name! (Two I's — capital S). 

He 

I never was so deluged with puns in my life ! And illustrated 
with cuts moresoever! ("Cuts?" says he, when the examiner 
asked him to draw the figures of his demonstrations in geometry : 
"I never thought of looking for cuts !") (They were all in the 
back of the book, and he had learnt the words by heart without 
'em.) Which reminds me of another nanny-goat in the paper. 
Long-winded discourse vs. Darwinism. Towards his pistly he 
asks "If we came from monkeys, where are our tails !" Weary 



(93 ) 

soul in front pew responds, "We 've worn 'em all off sitting on 
'em so long ! " Quod erat demonstrandum. 

By the way, Beecher lectured in Cleveland t'other night. 
... He can use language to express thought a pretty con- 
siderable deal. He said : " /'ve no objection to the descent 
from the monkey. If any man objects to descending from a 
monkey, why, he can stay there." ! . , . 

I 've been amusing myself with some of Tyndall's experiments 
on ice : letting a concentrated sunbeam strike thro' it, melting 
out stars on its track. Lovely ! Also watching the freezing 
of water under a magnifying glass. Nearly froze off the top of 
my head doing it the other day; but as the Shaughran says, 
"it was wuth it." 

So my A verses went in unrevised. Just as well. The 

idea is all there. I almost feel like despising and violating all 
form, when I see the fools that worship it. I always under- 
stood why Emerson made his poems rough — and I sympathize 
more than ever. 

■X- 

* -St 

All our ordinary bothers only need an outside point of view 
to let the sawdust out of them (rapid change of figure : Shak- 
sperian), and to get into another person's world gives us a big 
parallax for proper estimates of our own orbits. . . . What 
fairy mythology is there, of a man who shifts from one life to 
another and back all the time : so when I read your letters I 
am a Californian out and out — or in and in. 

•55- * 

Nor do I like two adjectives with comma, in description. 

Always, I should say, strike out one of them (vide vs, 

Turgenieff). 



( 94 ) 

Exception i. When the first qualifies the second + the 
noun as one quantity (no comma). 

2. When the two describe practically the same quality) as, 
the long, narrow slit). This is not to be found in books, I 
guess, but is correct, is n't it ? 

^ -x- 

I don't think there 's anything in the idea that a man must 
stay out of medicine unless he can go in like a monomaniac — 
i. e., an enthusiast. Why shouldn't people go into things 
soberly, seeing the other side, and all sides ; and with no vows 
to stay in them till death do them part. It sotmds well to lay 
down great moral axioms about what people should do and 
should n't do and get them off solemnly to young people — to 
their great impressment but ultimate confusion ; but it is a little 
absurd. 

Read Caine's Recollections of Rossetti — but it will make 
you melancholy. — Heavens ! what does n't ? Carlyle and Em- 
erson correspondence, for instance, 

Jeffreson's " Real Lord Byron " (Franklin Square) makes 
him awfully real indeed : selfish, vulgar, low. Shelley was ten 
times as much of a 7nan. 

C. Kegan Paul's Essays are good. 

Old Don Quixote is perennially good reading. A Dore copy 
lies on our parlor table, and every few days at some odd ten 
minutes I open it and read again. That of the enchanted boat, 
for instance. It is universal human nature. Cervantes really 
was like Shakspere. 



(95 ) 

Do you know Landor's Imaginary Conversations ? Some of 
them are Shaksperian. Read some of them if you haven't. 
They are real dramatic poems, like Browning's, some of them. 
Hy VIII and Anne Boleyn, e. g. — and Dante and Beatrice. 

Hamerton's Round my Hse is pretty reading for light read- 
ing. — But I have lately some moods that require the things 
that go right to the core of the intellect, or else the piteous and 
tragic things that wring my heart. Sometimes history — plain 
prose — will serve best. Mommsen's Rome, e. g., in the Julius 
Caesar epoch. The novelists for the most part seem idle chat- 
terers. . . . 

Read Emily Bronte in the Famous Women Series (the style, 
etc., you need not resent or criticise — the total effect of the 
picture is all) — then re-read Villette. 

How do you like Miss Phelps' new book? I confess it 
moved me greatly — perhaps hitting just the right mood to do 
it in. . . . Read A. Trollope's Autobiog.? (Franklin Square 
and big print.) To me very interesting. Think of that mother 
of his ! Would like to have known her. Be sure you read 
Renan's Recollections. 

■35- 

Did you know Kant wrote some poems when young (I don't 
know but later than young) ? This is one : 

" Was auf das Leben folgt, deckttiefe Finsterniss; 
Was uns zu thun gebiihrt, dcs [sic] sind wir nur gewiss, 
Dem kann, wie Lilienthal, kein Tod die Hoffnung rauben, 
Der glaubt, um recht zu thun, recht thut, um froh zu glauben. " 

Have you read Daudet's bit of reminiscence of Turgenieff in 
Century ? And the portrait ! 

If only men did n't die just as they are getting ripe and 



( 96) 

great ! Death is n'f a gentle angel. The old view is the true 
view. No flowers can hide the skull. It is not only awful — 
it is horrible that people should die. 

■5fr * 

You are not like me if you don't find yourself doubting the 
tangible existence of people when you have no current evidence. 
(Talk about belief in immortality: I find it hard enough to be- 
lieve in real being at all, when it is well around a corner any- 
where, out of sight. — Still — 1 do sort o' believe in immortality. 
Can't make myself think it 's all hereditary prepossession either. 
But whether old friends will ever have time to find each other 
out?) (Quid metui resurrecturus ? Meantime this life is 
enough for us to think about. There's no doubting we live 
now.) . . . 

The moral of it all is, brace up ! As young Orme says in 
Orley Farm (you have to read two or three of Trollope after 
his autobiog.) it won't do for a fellow ever to knock under. 
To himself, you know. To let himself see that he's afraid. 
Besides, what is there to squelch anybody, in all these things ? 
It's an episode anyhow. — What '11 you bet we are not immortal. 
In that case the whole affair is only a picnic — a day's excursion 
— and no matter how it comes out. To-morrow will have 
new chances. I rather incline to think that all those people 
who die with no hope of (or fear of ) immortality are in for the 
biggest surprise of their lives. 



( 97 ) 



[1 884.] 



You would like this winter weather. Remember how the snow 
creaks under foot, in zero-cold? and the good smell of frozen 
oxygen, and how your moustache freezes up, and how the fields 
of blue-white snow stretch away everywhere, and Pan retires 
all his passions and emotions from the landscape, and leaves 
only pure intellect — cold and white and clear? — One ought 
to have, tho', a house about 7 miles square, full of open fires 
and open friends — both kept well replenished and poked up. — 
I should like to see some of these winter scenes, and some of 
these sunsets, out of your west window. — I wish you a very 
happy rest-of-the-year. 

You say you have written many times to me mentally — and 
say that such bring no replies. You do them injustice. Cer- 
tainly they do. Only the replies are also mental. You have 
had no end of such. 

You recollect old Geo. Herbert after a season of dumps 
congratulates himself that once more he doth " relish vers- 
ing " — So there are faint symptoms that now that the apple- 
trees are at last in blossom I may relish writing to my friends. 
Alack, I have not so many to whom I ever write, or from whom 
I am ever written to (I no longer teach the English language) 
that I need wait so long to write at least a brief scratch. . . . 
The truth is I desire to hear from you. Otherwise there are 
hardly enough apple-trees out to move me, even this May 
morning. — Is it any wonder people talk about the weather ? 



(98) 

For what is there that plays the deuce with us like that, I 
confess I am completely under it half the time — and more 
than half under, the balance, . , , It 's very pretty now, I 
assure you. Treacherous, a little, but full of greenery and 
blossoms. In New England no doubt it is still prettier. In 
the past week the sky — even in Ohio — has been summer 
blue. You remember what that is, between big round pearly 
white clouds? But for six months previously it was a dome 
of lead, or dirty white. Now and then, of a rare day, the 
color of a black and blue spot on a boy's knee. Once 
or twice in a month, when the sun tried to shine, the hue 
of very poor skim milk. The gods economizing, no doubt, and 
taking that mild drink in place of nectar — or slopping it 
around feeding their cats — or the Sky terriers. If I recollect 
aright you have midsummer in May, there. Hot forenoons 
and bootiful fog in the evening ? I would like to help you dig 
your garden. We have now apple, pear, and cherry trees in 
blossom, yellow currant, white and purple lilacs, flowering 
cherry: pansies, tuUps, lily of the valley, and genuine solid green 
turf sprinkled with gold buttons of dandelions. The air is full of 
fragrance. The robins, bluebirds, wrens, and orioles are build- 
ing wonderful nests all over the place. Three red and black 
game bantams are parading on the lawn, and seven baby ban- 
tams about as big as the end of my thumb are skittering around 
under the laylocs. 

■X- 

I hope this fine breezy summer day extends even unto your 
latitude. If it does, you are not longing for the fleshpots of 
California. . . . 

I suppose the political fragrancies don't penetrate much into 
your workshop. Where are you, exactly, and what doing? 
Snails and such ? Can you hit the snail on the head, every 
time? 



( 99 ) 






Why, tell me why, have n't you written me some more let- 
ters ? The idea of writing a real good one like the last, and not 
following it up. Noblesse oblige, you know. You assume 
responsibilities when you write and create an appetite for your 
letters. "But I haven't written"? Why, of course not. 
Homo sum & nihil humanum alienum a me puto (to be sure 
homo means woman as well as man — but never mind the 
Latin when Mr. Kellogg isn't around) — and one of the priv- 
ileges of my sex is to be grouty and crusty and silent and to be 
ministered unto by letters and things. . . . Well, here '^ another 
and a better reason. This is the State of Ohio. Our electricity 
here takes the form of thunder-showers : yours there goes to 
animal spirits and mental sprightliness. . . . Only one faculty 
remains alive in us all the year round : our receptivity to let- 
ters. We are more greedy for them than ever before or else- 
where, in fact. But as to writing any, we are much too stupig. 
How would you like to visit some interesting foreign coun- 
try, and be taken thro' it in the night, getting a glimpse by a 
flash of lightning once an hour thro' the car-window? Thusly, 
alas, do I see my friends in Berkeley. . . : I see you vividly, 
but not enough times. My life is largely there, still, but in 
these scattered gleams — reproduced, of course, over and over 
again in the mind's eye, but fed only by memory, between the 
gleams. I hear the beginnings of tales that are not continued. 
It is like going from theatre to theatre all over a city, hurrying 
in and out after seeing but one scene at each. 



* 



Yes, I could do the review, but it might not suit your public. 
I have n't the habit of that sort of judicial tone, so called and 
considd, which consists in thinking one man about as good as 



( loo ) 

another, and in showing wherein everybody is mediocre and not 
quite so excellent as somebody else (who would in turn be 
proved mediocre if being reviewed.) 

I like these lines that limp. For instance again, 

"Calls the spade, spade" 

just suits me — yet it is an acquired taste, I suppose. At 20 
I should have preferred " Call me early mother dear, etc." Of 
course the rhythm all depends on a subtle estimate of the em- 
phasis and J>ause. 

* * 

I would rather take a hand in a collection of French trans- 
lations than German, for my part. For I am coming to believe 
the Germans an unpoetic people — even their greatest poets 
are pretty wordy and dull and clumsy. But there is a school 
of modern French poets worth translating. I have been doing 
some of Sully Prudhomme, for instance. It is — to the Ger- 
mans — as cloud-fluff to cheese. Or as the violin to the horse- 
fiddle. 

As to French poetry, I know there 's another side. I believe 
as I used to, about the mass of French writers. It 's only here 
and there a Geo. Sand, or a delicate poet. As to German — 
Heine was a Jew of the Jews. You might as well instance Job 
as a German. A friend of mine calls certain graceful verse 
"unsubstantial." It's true much of the French is so. 

. . . Your test is the best one : what sticks in the mind. Or 
as some one puts it, as a test of great writers, whose work has 
most entered into the world's intellectual life ? 



( loi ) 

I have asked Pres. Cutler of Adelbert College, Cleveland, to 
send you a copy of his Argument on Co-Education. The Trus- 
tees' vote was f majority to keep co-ed. Faculty all opposed 
except the President ! Infandum ! 

Is there not some friend of yours at the Smithsonian who 
would be so benevolent as to send me (if you asked him) some 
publications from time to time for our village Library — the 
which I have been organizing and have now in good running 
order. We are poor and hungry for valuable literature. E. g. 
here is the new Bureau of Ethnology, with some published re- 
ports — and there are constantly things that would throw light 
into our dark corners — " How far yon little candle " would 
" throw its beams " if it would get into our little candlestick of 
a Library and reading room. . . . 

Item : what is the name, rank, and title of a little flat, cross- 
ribbed, reddish scale of a leaf-eating, wood-louse-resembling 
insect, which hath a cover hinged on to the top of his rear in 
such a way as to cover and uncover himself at will ? curious to 
behold. 

Am hurried just now. Have a MS. story of an author- 
in-posse to examine and (I fear) criticize to pieces, an article 
to write for the Pall Mall . . . and a bk to review for the Nation, 
which they have just sent me. Besides being awfully in arrears 
in correspondence. The spirit of writing letters has not 
moved my ink-waters for a long while. My friends (few 
enough at the best) must all be disgruntled at my silence. 
is the best man about that. He writes without regard to 



( 102 ) 

my sins of omission. He knows I don't change my animum 
with my coelum. . . . 

... I am suspicious of eccentric people, as a rule, more- 
over. And the fag end of a famous family is never wholly 
satisfactory: the beginnings of good blood are better than the 
thin lees. Each generation pours fresh water on the same old 
tea-leaves of genius, and it gets very weak. 

* * 

As to transition from quoted fine print, the Nation the 
other day let me go from one to the other with a dash and 
no set in. And they let me have my colons. Your dis- 
tinction bet. colons and semi-colons is mine also. For in- 
stance, I almost invariably use a semi-colon before " but." 
Always, I think, except where there has already occurred a 
semi-c. in the sentence, standing for a different use. . . . There 
is a subtlety, tho', which does not constitute an exception, but 
a different species of the generic use. . . . Two contrasted 
statements, set off separately against each other, instead of 
being duf-ted against each other. If they were put together 
with the butness expressed to connect them in the mind, it 
would require semi-colon. But I expressly wish nof to do this. 
To but them is to connect them into one thought. I wish to 
have them seen separately, for it is only the latter one I care 
about stating and only introduce the former one as the dry- 
goods clerk shows you a (?) dress before showing you the 
green one he wants you to buy. The comma and semi-colon 
connect : the period and colon separate. ... I have just 
looked at Emerson's works , . . and find very few colons. It 
would have been clearer, often, if they had used them. . . . 
And at several English books, where I find them used more. 
It is perhaps an Americanism to restrict their use too much ? 
I am very willing to believe, tho', that I overdo their use a 



( I03 ) 

little. One must n't use points any more than words, for his 
own private meaning : they are language, and must have their 
recognized value, if one can find out what that is: — their value 
among those best worth considering, one must be sure to add. 

* -St 

Did you ever look at Galton's "Faculty"? Interesting 
book, . . . He gives some copies of composite photographs, 
I have been trying lapping one over another with the stereo- 
scope and it works beautifully, — McGahan's "Campaign 
against Khiva " is a good bk to read at some odd moments, 
for distracting the mind, I 've taken to travels again lately. 

•5fr 

I am in the midst of Geo. Sand's Histoire de ma Vie, You 
must read it. It is great. We have to take her right in. She 
is a beautiful mugwump. Decidedly you must get up your 
French, 

This man Flaubert I must find out more about. If Geo, 
Sand (at 62) loved him so much at 65, he must have been 
something, 

I like to find in such histories, that people can love when 
they are 60, or 70, or 80, It is all /i/c till love goes. 

You and I had better make of ourselves a Soc, for Psychic 
Research. Last number (or but one) of " Science " has good 
article from Simon Newcomb (astron.) on the ineffably foolish 
English "society." Just the one I was going to write for 
Nation, only ten times better. Would n't you like to be a 
dem'd aristocrat, with ruffles and things, and employ all these 



( I04 ) 

sharp and competent fellows to write the things we know ought 
to be written, without having to write at all, ourselves ? To be 
"quite one of us, you know," instead of a writer? 

■X- 

I don't feel sure that Emerson's optimism may not be as 
near right as our pessimism — i Quien sabe ? You see we don't 
know. Ever see a queer bk of Dr, Hammond's : Mind and 
Will — or I forget the title. He 's a nice hopeful pessimist for 
you. 

Haweis' Musical Memories has a number of good things : 
among others ace' of Wagner's Trilogy — descriptive, not so 
" deep " as most of 'em. Oh the idiots that write about great 
men — we idiots ? Horrendum ! . . . 

Derelictum — but I have n't yet looked into Morley book on 
Emerson. I do so hate all I see about 'most anybody. Let 
a man write about himself. It 's the only fellow he knows any- 
thing about. 

I want to write to you about a lot of things, but I hate to 
use pen and ink. An Englishman is said to have invented an 
addition to the telephone which writes out your message for you 
on paper. Why not every fellow talk his article or letter into 
it, and not use pen? We're coming to it — but "slowly, 
slowly " and we " wither on the shore " — (if that 's it.) Brown- 
ing is great. Ever read his Pauline ? Early poem, but things 
in it. 

I don't think other people feel the way I do about that. 
When a thing is written they have a trembling hope, at least, 
that it is good, and anyhow wish to have it used. But you 



( I05 ) 

should see the equanimity with which I write thing after thing 
— both prose and verse — and stow them away, never sending 
them anywhere, or thinking of printing any book of them, at 
present if ever. Sometimes I do think I will leave a lot of 
stuff for some one to pick out a posthumous volume from — 
but more and more my sober judgment tells me that other 
people have seen or will see all that I have, and will state it 
better. 

. . Queer, queer fellows we all are. Must be fun for the 
bigger fellows that hide in the clouds and watch us. 

■X- 

That 's the way I feel about my writing. I know I see lots 
of things that are true and needed — but I feel that I am a 
poor specimen of a good class, and that some of the million 
who see 'em as clearly will by and by if not now be ready and 
able to state 'em far better, and there 's time enough ! I keep 
seeing things that make me say: there ! same as my idea, and 
expressed twice as well — thank the Lord ! 

* 

Don't tell any such thing about what I write anonymously to 
any one with a penchant or opportunity for newspaper " per- 
sonals," ever. I dread them exceedingly. I had an offer lately 
to be personalized, which really scared me. The safest way is 
not to tell anybody, till things are a year or two old and no 
longer of interest. 

Love to when you write. 

It will really be as great a service as most men have any 
reason to hope to do, if he shows an example of a man who 



( io6 ) 

does little services all the time in some common way of earn- 
ing an honest living for himself and a wife and some children. 
To do what it would be well for the average man to do — is a 
pretty good purpose. 

Part of our fervor to do something remarkable is of the old 
Adam in us. 

* 
* ■* 

I never could see how any one past 20 could reminiscence 
— to other ears, or to their own. The past seems so full of 
mistakes and follies and infelicities both from the without and 
the within — Besides : what need to can the old dead sea 
fruit — there is always a fresh day ready to pick off the tree 
Igdrasil. Time has a kind of tart fresh flavor that I always half 
like, when picked fresh — but others may have all the preserves 
of that fruit. 



[1885.] 



I ought, in the matter of the snow, too, to have mentioned 
the way it gives under the foot on a zero day, with a crisp 
crunch and a keen creak : " low on the sand, and loud on the 
stone," and louder yet on the board-walk, which reverberates 
it like the resounding belly of the guitar. Yes, and the mani- 
fold sparkle of it, looking toward a full moon — avr,piOiiov 

Saw a snow-storm against the hour-high sun . . . this morn- 
ing. Clear overhead, dark ragged cloud along East. Sun 
burns thro' then a clear strip thro', and snow falling across. 



( I07 ) 

Query for John Le Conte — Why vacant space between 
cloud-source and where snow began .to show ? . . . 

As to snow-landscape, says it always looks like a Xmas 

card. Slaty blue woods, slaty blue sky, whitey blue snow (and 
if you go softly into the woods, a slaty gray rabbit or two, with 
a slaty blue shadow on the snow.) 

* -5^ 

It would be the greatest Christmas card you ever saw if I 
could send you a look at our world this morning : mercury i ° 
below zero; ground no ground at all — but a sheet of ice- 
crusted snow everywhere ; roads, walks, everything iced ; and 
aloft — every separate twig of every shrub and tree a little 
cylinder of ice. The sun is on it now, and the wind wags 
everything (not "waves," because all is stiff in the ice-armor. 
It is strange to see the awkward swaying of the elm-boughs, as 
if drunk, and staggering about), and everything glitters, with 
points of fire — cold fire (like Tennyson's stars, in Maud) that 
comes and goes incessantly. Why am I not out looking at it ? 
Because I went out and fed my chickens, put hot water in their 
frozen crock, got straw from the barn and filled one end of 
their day-house, as foot-warmer for them, stared around a 
while, and got enough of it. Zero weather nips the human 
nose and ears, when these have been mollified by ten years of 

Cal^ and more. 

* 

■H- ¥: 

C. F. (the same that I was writing from this morning — for 
it is still Sunday, Jan. i8, 85 — except that the sun has gone 
down and taken the glitter with it, tho' it has left all the ice. 
It shone hard as ever it could all day, but made no more 
impression on the ice-armor of the trees than if it had been 
moonlight. I said this morning, in my state of crude igno- 



( loS ) 

ranee, that eaeh twig was surrounded by a cylinder of ice. I 
have taken two walks since, one of them into the woods down 
the river, and know more than I did — like the boy that the 
mule kicked. I find that the ice has made a cylinder on the 
top of each lateral (or slanting) twig, fastened to it along a 
narrow line only. That is to say, the twig is more than f free 
of the ice. On vertical twigs and branches, it is on the lee- 
ward side. It is a case for Prof. John Le Conte. I cannot 
understand it. The ice-cylinder is \ inch diameter on \ inch 
twigs ; \ in. on \ in. twigs. Little terminal clusters of maple 
buds have small globes of ice around them. Any weed that 
has pendent seeds or berries left, has now diamond drops. 
The grasses that stick up thro' the crusted snow (all glairy 
like ice) have ice-cylinders on the leeward side, sometimes \ 
in. on mere threads, and always attached only by a line on one 
side, occasionally even skipping for a little space, and not 
touching the grass. Some grasses stand up thus [sketch] 
broken and pendent. The ice has made long drops on every 
thread and seed. One field of delicate weed-stuff (dried and 
frozen, left standing from last Fall) was a wilderness of glit- 
ter — a mimic "glittering heath" of Morris's Sigurd. All this 
ice-work, by the way, is perfectly pure, transparent crystal. 
You know how finely divided an elm's ultimate twiglets are, 
when bare? Imagine each one sheeted in this crystal and 
every one a separate thread of white fire, in the sun, and glit- 
tering in the wind. — One street is set close with such elms, 
arching over into maples on the other side, and you can pic- 
ture the vista it makes. If you meet Dr. John, . . . ask him 
what he makes of horizontal icicles, laid along the tops of twigs, 
just touching them. 

It is snowing and blowing — do you realize that we have no 
touch of Spring yet ? Everything is bare and bleak. The sky 



( I09 ) 

is a cold slate-colored cloud roof, out of whose cracks comes 
only wretched snow. Some robins and blue-birds came back 
from the South by the Almanac, and are starved and frozen. 

* 

We are having a run to the seaside for "health." ... I 
wish you could see the Atlantic as it comes in on the rocks 
here on Cape Ann, I think the Pacific never is quite so fine, 
at least on any shore I have seen out there. 

■3fr 
■X- * 

I wish you could see (and share) the queerness and pretti- 
ness of the place. We watch the fishing boats — sails of all 
sizes and shapes — flitting out to sea and in again. It is a 
much livelier harbor than San Yx^° Bay, and so has much more 
life color, tho' not so fine sky and earth colors. 






I wish I might hear from you. I wish more yet that I 
might see you and all of you. But the Earth does n't shrink 
very fast — and the years do. 

It all goes as usual with us here. We don't die and we are 
not born — we neither marry nor give in marriage : but all 
things remain as they were. I hear very little from Cal^ but it 
is the place I most desire, still, to hear from. 



■5fr * 



I cannot think of as Mrs. , tho' I make daily efforts 

to. Can you ? Yet I suppose she is ? Well, I don't know as 



( no ) 

our part of her is, after all. How is it for a theory that each 
of us has a different piece of a friend ? And nobody ever gets 
that. . . . 

What a stupendous and ineffable surprise it will be to some 
of us pessimists if we shall wake up in a world where some of 
these great people are — or their equals or superiors. Think 

of dying with or in front of one's face — and then 

suddenly opening the eyes of the spirit and seeing Geo. Sand 
or somebody — ! . . . 

It is a curious fact for the observer of our social status, that 

when you take into consideration the Reviews of the , 

as well as those of the , there is no city outside of N. Y. 

and Boston that compares with San Fr™ in this respect. Yet 
that is the Far West, supposed in this part of the world to 
be a field for the missionary, and the primeval schoolmaster 
abroad ! 

As to whether I would accept a certain offer, if made : — 
there would be two very serious obstacles. First, that I am 
not the man, in several important respects, to fill the place 
well. I know the sort of man it requires, and that I am not 
the one. Second, that I could not leave here at present. . . , 
A man for that place should be picked out by his enemies, not 
his friends. There is a great opportunity there. 






Neither ought I to give you the impression that the religious 
question is my only reason for not encouraging any effort to 
have me selected at Yale for that vacant chair. . . . Again, I 
should be sorry if I had made you suppose that I am one of 
those bull-headed enthusiasts who wishes to foist his own 



< I" ) 

hobby into every company. I remember one of my students, 
since graduating, giving me warm praise for the delicacy I had 
seemed to show in respecting the religious points of view of 
my classes, always. 

But on the other hand, you cannot, of course, realize (till 
you have come to teach the subject) how all our best literature 
in this century — and a good deal of it in the last century — 
dips continually into this underlying stream of philosophical 
thought, and ethical feeling. In Memoriam, for example, is 
one of the poems I read with my Senior classes. You may 
discuss its rhythms, its epithets, its metaphors, its felicities and 
infelicities as Art, — you are still on the surface of it. The fact 
is that a thinking man put a good lot of his views of things in 
general into it — and those views and his feelings about them 
are precisely the " literature " there is in the thing. And the 
study of it, as literature, should transfer these views and feelings 
straight and clear to the brain of the student. So of Middle- 
march, or Romola, Or Hume's Essays, Or Faust, or Manfred, 
or Re'nan's Souvenirs de I'enfance. 

The more you think of it the more you will come to see that 
the moment you drive the study of literature away from the 
virile thought of modern men and women, you drive it into 
the puerilities of word-study, and mousing about "end-stopt 
lines " and all that. 

* * 

... I was feeding my flock with M, Arnold, and Spencer, 
and Mill, They teach Spenser with an s in other colleges : I 
taught him with a c (being on the c-coast again.) You may 
say I did n't teach these great moderns very thoroughly or 
well — but nobody else taught them in college at all. Nobody 
does yet, . , , If I did n't teach them I leaked them a good 
deal. , . , 

Of course Miss Ingelow is the greater, for she is very — 



( 112 ) 

very. (Forgotten tho' by the world in general, already? But 
I like her very much, and never can forget her, 

•X- 

Really you'll /lave to get up your French and read Geo. 
Sand's Autobiog. 

I look with interest for Cross' life of Geo. Eliot. 

Vide good review of Emerson book in Nation Jan S, p. 40. 
Wish I 'd written it. It 's true as a gun. 

I like Vittoria and Sealed in Miss Phelps' new book. . . . 
And I like Longfellow's M. Angelo. Have you ever really read 
that? I guess you are hardly old enough. You will take it 
with gray hairs. 

I wonder how Dr. Holmes' new Portfolio strikes you. How 
evidently he is old, and yet how charming it is — at least to 
me. I believe I like old people better than some. . . . Good 
thing by Harriet W. Preston, too, in the Atlantic. She knows 
how to write. How refreshing a trained writer is ! 

The only refuge for you from the whizzing of the brain 
along one track, is in reading French. Really I don't know 
how I could have tided over certain days and nights I have 
had ... if I had n't had a French story to read. You see 
there are n't any more good English stories, and you have to 
read the French ones. There never were many of the kind I 
mean — where the plot, and a certain snap about the dialogue, 
lead you along page after page. The French stories keep a 



(113) 

mature mind going, just as English ones do a child's mind. 
Geo. Sand, or Dumas p^re take my mind along just as Dickens 
used to when I was a boy. I confess that in the case of Dumas 
there is not so much residuum as in the case of Dickens — it 
all goes in at one ear and out of the other — but who cares? 
The thing is to drag the mind away from its pizens, and keep 
it away long enough to recuperate a little. 

If I spell "favo?/r," perhaps because I have been reading 
French lately. Tho' I always did prefer those u spellings, a 
little — while despising such questions too much for thinking 
much about it. I have a vague sense that words have a family 
pride in their true origin, that may as well be respected. As if 
a word should say to a person who spells it in its derivative 
entirety : " Oh who is this that knows the way I came ? " 
Somehow, there are several of the Websterisms, or American- 
isms, that jar on me as indicative of not knowing the way they 
came — or much else. 

Her interest in things outside of relation to her seemed 
rather fictitious. It is a horrible penalty to pay for fame and 
flattery. I more and more believe the only way for ordi- 
nary mortals is to keep out of sight, and write anonymously. 
Why not? It seems to me I should like a man very much who, 
having gained a good reputation, went on doing better and 
better work, "smiling unbeknownst." He would like to suc- 
ceed first, and timi do it, to make it clear to himself it was no 
fear of failure or timidity. 

* 



( 114 ) 

And this general criticism, that sad poems never ought to 
be written or printed. Peccavi, peccavimus. — Perhaps they 
are well enough for young people to read, for they won't believe 
there 's any truth in such things. 

You never will get a rich man — who has devoted his life to 
getting rich — to give without a visible quid pro quo. It may 
be glory, or the church with its influence in getting God to 
wink at some trifling peccadilloes, or some other more or less 
obscure means to the end — but the end is always there. . . . 
At least : / iiroer have known of a case to the contrary. (That 's 
all anyone can safely say.) 

•}«• ft 

The paper is decent and presentable, for that class of paper. 
But it is a kind that I have no use for or interest in, nor have 
you. It is hopelessly vulgar — the clean sort of vulgarity. 
The butcher's apprentice after he has been to boarding school 
and learned to wear clean linen. I have no hope of any 
young man who thinks it is journalism to recount the names of 
the silly people in the dress circle at the theatre, etc. And 

the attacks on and are merely a little cleaner-linened 

scufiling around on the same street-level with them. . . . There 
is no power or knowledge evidenced in the paper, to show a 
raison d'etre. Simply to be decent does n't constitute a reason 
for getting up and talking in public ; especially if one is a little 
silly with his decency. The way to "fight " w'd be to fur- 
nish a better paper — posith'ely better. This is only negatively 
better — just as the poorest little Sunday School paper in the 
country is. 

* -3^ 



( 115 ) 

It 's safe to look for some pretty selfish motive in the average 
man — you know; and safe to think A or B is "average," till 
you find some nobleness in him (as tested by life, not words) 
that marks him as very exceptional. 

•X- 

You must not suppose I am getting suspicious or incapable 
of believing in generous aims and motives. I believe in them 
as much as ever — when I see them. And I see them, too, 
here and there. But I have learned not to expect them in 
people who make great show of having them. These wonder- 
ful young men who proclaim their noble purposes and make a 
fuss about themselves — I don't expect to find anything but 
the most common and vulgar selfishness in them. 

* 

But let us not think these things of greater importance in the 
universe than they are. That steady revolution of the earth — 
it is a great comfort to me. 

That 's the way to look at it. Bird's eye view of all our 
operations, with the rest of the solar system slowly revolving in 
the distance. 

We must acquire a kind of philosophical sang froid — doing 
what we can, but not taking on, or lying awake and whizzing, 
about what we can't do. 

•X- 

More and more I wish all literary work was anonymous. 
These people who are madly tearing around after a reputation, 
and these people (worst of all) who assume that ive are — that 



( "6 ) 

is the really appalling thing. ... I wish they would n't always 
" say something " if a body sends some printed thing. 

* 

Dear Fellow-Countryman — 

Your picture, and your pictures, look at me so often that I 
am not without a sense of your being somewhere around — 
but neither the photograph nor the landscapes give me much 
news — late news — of you. . . . And what are you both 
doing ? I imagine you at a big table in the Museum — not 
exactly shelling corn, but cornering shells. Are you ? , . . You 
see they are going to have more row in the University — so the 
papers say. Lots of good (?) times "andweaint in 'em." . . . 
I 'd like to live a thousand years and watch the play go on, out 
there. Would n't you ? We are spectators now. We can hiss 
the bad actors and clap the good ones. But they wont refund 
the money at the door, if the thing is a failure. 

I was wishing you were at hand the other evening to tell us 
about some baby Anodonta shells — the larval condition — 
that we found in the mother's arms (or shawl-fringe — or apron- 
strings) and fussed-with, under the microscope (J inch object- 
ive). Very cute and pretty. Went to Cleveland Library and 
got W. K. Brooks' Inver. Zoology and studied 'em up. Good 
book. There 's more fun to the square inch in a microscope 
than in anything I've ever found (except a good fellow — but 
you can't haul one of them out of a box whenever you feel like 

it. ...).. . has struck an old receipt book to-day: 

1818. A Compendious Repository of Practical Informa- 
tion. . . . Tells how to cook " Kebobbed mutton." . . . And 
a "curious Method of Roasting a Pig from an old Manuscript." 
( Whose old ms. do you s'pose we could get the pig from ?) 



("7) 

Please tell to send me some manuscript (not to get 

pigs out of, but) to launch at some magazine or other. Prose 
or verse, or both. Why not? "Quick, quick." 

Would n't it be fun to have money and time and train up a 
lot of writers (living a couple of hundred years, of course, to 
watch 'em along). 

Have you read Bayard Taylor's Life and Letters (by Horace 
Scudder and some lady) ? Very interesting. Curious to see 
how full his mind was of himself and his own literary works 
and plans, in a very naive, honest way. A man chock full of 
force. If he had had a good college education he would have 
been a power. But he had to scratch along up, anyhow and 
everyhow. 

By the way, that Brahma of Emerson's. Have you seen in 
Edwin Arnold's new Poem /its version and the original Sans- 
krit given. I never was so astonished as to find it was merely 
a paraphrase of the old Skr. — How cd Emerson ever let it go 
as his, and stand so, year after year ? 

Geo. Eliot's Autobiog. makes good reading. (I 'm glad it 's 
in Franklin Square. " What one is, why may not millions be ?") 



* 
* * 



Geo. Eliot's life in Franklin Square now. ... She says 
Henry Esmond disagreeable story at the end — because " he 
was in love with the daughter all thro' the bk and then married 
the mother at last" — Yet I think it seems all right, as one 



( ITS ) 

reads it. Who would have had him marry the other, knowing 
her? 

The orthodox people will not like tilings Geo, Eliot says in 
her letters, and they will try to frown her down. But they will 
not succeed. She was great, and good too. Let them cast 
stones who are better. She was clear-headed and rational, 
that 's all ; and had that faith in the Divine wisdom that makes 
one feel sure the true is — in the long run — the safe and good. 

* 
* * 

Have you read 's bk. . . . If you have, you must be 

tired ! I have just done with it, and find it the most weari- 
some piece of carpenter and joiner work in the world. I con- 
fess to skipping. No mortal will ever read it through at all — 
or at the risk of putting off their mortality prematurely. It is 
all a mass of pretty writing. ... It is the old-fashioned style 
of "reviewing" of the old "Reviews;" which consisted in say- 
ing ponderous things about the thing in hand, but never giving 
a spark of real analysis of it — never really hitting /'/. , . . The 
thing for a modern critic to do is to pick out the true things 
that we did n't all knmv were true, and say those simply. How 
easy to fill page after page telling what is perfectly true about 
a cat or a clam : it is alive ; it digests food ; it is two miles 
away from the baker's shop; it is not Dan' Webster; it re- 
volves around the sun once each year ; it cannot talk Hebrew ; 
it was not the man that struck Billy Paterson; etc., etc. 

* 

Who do you s'pose wrote this review of . . . .? It 

praises him far more than I should, but I am pleased with a 
certain stiff old-fashioned elegance in the review, and its sug- 
gestion of a man with a horizon, and literary experience. So 



( 119 ) 

I am curious to know who does it. I should say — at a guess 

— it is a man just 55 years old — once a minister, now pri- 
vately a liberal — wears gold spectacles — has a good library 

— married — walks slowly and with a large thick cane — be- 
nevolent— not aggressive — bass voice — knows a good deal. 
Do you ever amuse yourself guessing at personalities from their 

writings? 's book is one of that vexing sort of books 

that you know will please everybody a great deal more than it 
deserves to. But your vexation lessens when you remember 
how quickly such a book will die. It will — in ten years — 
be one of those bks which "no gentleman's library" etc.— but 
which no human being ever looks into — except that college 
professors will recommend it to students, and Freshmen will 
crib its elegant nothings for compositions, which the other 
Freshmen will very much admire. 



* 



I don't suppose I made myself very clear about my views of 
-'s book. It goes back to certain bottom convictions and 



instincts of mine. ... The habit of taking fine phrases about 
things for good talk about them. Nothing penetrated, or tried 
to penetrate the topic on hand. A topic was only a nail on 
which each hung as much tinsel and jingling stuff as he could 
get to stick on it. " So he." Such writers need to go to school 
to our best natural science writers. Some day I 'm going to 
come out and tell what I think nat. science is good for, as a 
study. Some people will then say (not you) "how he has 
changed his views ! " 






I 'm making acquaintance with another Frenchman I like : 
Balzac. He sticks some sharp and deep probes into the 
human heart. Like Thackeray, he makes one wonder " if he 



means me. 



( I20 ) 

I go with you entirely about St. Matthew's poetry, and the 
Greek of it, "How he does it" is by being that way, I suppose. 
But perhaps he is an example of the educational effect of keep- 
ing one's mind constantly in contact with the choicest of every- 
thing. Think what a hodge-podge of influences most of us 
tumble around in, all our lives. 

This getting up in the morning wrong foot foremost is one 
of the chief ills of life. More fun over night is what would 
keep us from it. But the prescription is like Port wine and 
l)eacocks' tongues to the beggar. Going to bed early is some- 
times a safeguard. I wish you 'd write a mag. essay about the 
woes and wants of children, such as 3'ou speak of in that con- 
nection. It would do good. Parents don't mean to be mean ; 
they need light. 

I have come to feel a good deal your disrelish of poetry. A 
friend of mine writes to me that he lately said "I always de- 
spised it ; I believe I am coming to hate it." He was thinking 
of the value of hard facts. 

But every now and then, at an odd moment, I feel all the 
old charm of it: " Das ew'ge, alte Lied " — (remember that poem 
of Anastasius Griin in Golden Treasury of German Song). I 
constantly find little things in the magazines and papers that 
I like. 

in his talk with you, simply differs (apparently) with us 

as to the thing oi first importance in education. I can't help 
feeling that first comes the need of lifting people up to higher 
planes. It is bad if A or B grows up without any trade, and 
so bungles about, or idles, or starves. — But it 's bad if he stays 
in that class to which such things are likely to occur, when he 
might have been hauled up to higher grades. . . . 

Your tale of the Doctor is very interesting. Life is very in- 
teresting, if one has any eyes. 

* * 



( 121 ) 

As a writer on abstract subjects for the hurrying reader I 
should say your defect is in not making the poitits stick right 
out and hit his eye, will he, nill he. Directness — perhaps 

one may call it. The thing that has n't and that Godkin 

has — whatever it is exactly. So that after going away the 
reader remembers for 24 hours the main thing you said. . . . 

You run on, a little — saying good things, but like and 

Dame Quickly about the parcel gilt goblet — following chance 
suggestions in the mind, instead of driving along one track, 
ruthlessly cutting off all side-ideas. 

I object entirely to the Alumnse Associations, because they 
are on the radically wrong tack of separating the sexes in 
intellectual matters. It's all a going back to the meeting- 
house separation, one side for each sex. It emphasizes and 
makes absurdly prominent the sex difference again. When 
human beings work at intellectual things, who cares whether 
they are male or female ? It is simply vulgar to care. Would 
you like a male and female department in a magazine ? Or a 
horse car ? 

I use the word [alumnae] under protest: I should prefer to 
consider alumni — like so many other words of that sort — of 
both genders. . . . Your arguments pro a separate alumnai 
association-a, to act as a general-a lever-a, separata from the 
boys-i, are good and have weight — but I am a kind of a 
" man convinced against his will " in the matter. I can see but 
this one direction — when we come to reduce generals to par- 
ticulars — in which they have any raison d'etre as a distinct-a 
body-a. The matter of preparatory advantages, perhaps, is 
another— and a thing of immense importance. ... It is 



( 122 ) 

mighty hard to resist the attraction of gravitation. So many 
forces tend to pull the whole educational system down hill in 
this country, that it will take all our tugging to budge it an 
inch upward. Yet we will tug ! . . . Can you get for me the 
Report of the Eastern alumnae (Reportam) you speak of? I 
should like it very much. . . . 

I like all you say about the woman question. It 's good to 
know that a few people see the thing right end foremost, for 
where a few see, there will by and by be some to act. Once 
in a while one meets a woman of sense, or a man of sense, 
and one has hopes of his species again. 

•X- 

You perhaps have been accustomed to believe the often 
repeated assertion that great institutions must grow, very 
slowly. That is a notion that it has been for the interest of 
the old colleges to keep up. In point of fact, it is not neces- 
sarily true in modern times. No doubt it was true, once. 
How long has it taken Johns Hopkins to grow ? Or the Univ. 
of Michigan? "A great University" would exist anywhere 
the instant there was a sufficient number of great men in that 
particular spot, ready to teach and to investigate. There is no 
reason in the nature of things why it should not be produced, 
so far as securing its existence goes, in a week — if one must 
make an extreme statement — true enough, too, however para- 
doxical. How long would it take, think you, to make a better 
library than Yale College has, given the requisite dollars ? 
About three weeks — i. e, long enough to send orders and 
drafts to England, France, and Germany. The old MSS. and 
curiosities of the Library, which require slow accumulation, 
are of no earthly account anyway. Sufficient salaries would 
draw plenty of good men. I don't doubt, in all sober earnest, 
that a plant of ten million dollars would build a N. Y. Uni- 



( 123 ) 

versity that should forever make any of our tinkering and 
bothering about Yale College unnecessary and absurd. 

Yours just reC^ with the poor S verse-writer's letter. 

Such things are awful. If it 's piteous to see a dog's eyes when 
he is trying to be a human being and get close up to one 's 
mind, how much more so to see these low-grade human beings 
trying to be somebody. Especially if actual poverty and the 
body-suffering comes in. It must be frightful to be getting old, 
and poorer and poorer, and absolutely no hope. 

* 

Almost thou persuadest me to be a pessimist. . . . And we 
shall not be very bad pessimists (not pessimi pessimistorum) 
while we admit that after all it is worth living, for us, and worth 
trymg for, for the future comers. 

You say, truth was spoken in Zoroaster's time — all right. 
That shows that there 's no use in speaking it ? ! 

But all argument just plays on the surface. We don't know. 
Thou canst not know, the Voice replied. (Or I replied to the 
Voice.) My calendar for to-day says: 'Are not these, O 
soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ? " "Who knows but they 
are ? That we are not the highest is my constant conviction. 
— Blessed be the man that invented work. 

* 
* * 

This world is not out of the woods yet by any means. — 
Meantime I hope you are keeping your soul as tranquil as cir- 
cumstances will permit : taking the bird's-eye view, as a medi- 
cine, before each meal — and hearing, whenever you wake up 



( 124 ) 

in the night, that " sentinel " who goes his rounds " whispering 
to the worlds of space" " peace." — One must not expect to do 
very much more than the average. ... It 's a kind of greedi- 
ness that circumstances always conspire to cure us of. 

* 
* * 

I often think, when I fidget after doing more work and 
more good — Oh well. One must n't hope for the chance to 
do too much more than the average man. Now the average 
man does n't do anything. 

* 

I am busy getting up a village aid society — Awful weather 
for poor people without even potatoes and no blankets. 

Also making a new campaign for my struggling village 
library. ... It 's a hard world to really do anything in — but 
Lord, how easy to talk! 

* 

Don't you rather reluct at writing these last dates of the 
year? The illusion is strong on us that it really is a dying 
away, bit by bit, of one more set of opportunities — possibili- 
ties — liveabilities — A sort of annual Mystery, or Passion 
Play, of the End of Life. Then we slip over the ridge-pole 
into Jan. i, 2, etc. and begin to go down — faster and faster — 
and forget the old days behind. — We wish each other " merry" 
Xmas ; how merry do we succeed in being? Somebody has 
been editorialing that we have no business to wish people, or 
be (except children) " merry." I deny his overwise assertion. 
"We'd ought 'o" be merry. I can conceive a considerable 
number — or sets — of circumstances that could slide into this 
moment and make me merry. Couldn't you as \.o your self? 



( 125 ) 

I was merry for two minutes and a half this morning, when 

related the anecdote of the boy whose mother caught 

him in a lie, and tried to impress the story of Ananias on him. 
He had an idiot brother named Melchisedek. "How that 
story would have scared Melchisedek !" quoth the boy. "It 
don't scare me a bit ! " 






[On the back of a Christmas card, representing a wood- 
land stream:] 

This is the bank whereon the wild Time blows 
Where poor professors might forget their woes — 
"Where they their wiser faculties might find 
By leaving their unwiser Faculties behind. 
Thither, O Dean, Oh! thither let us flee, 
And build no more a U-ni-vers-i-tee. 
We 'U lie at ease, all quiet, calm, and cool, 
j)^nd yes — we '11 have to have our little school. 
Line upon line — O, it will be too utter! 
Our little school of fishes fried in butter! 



[ 1886.] 



Isn't it kind of odd that among one's Christmas cards — 
no matter how many he receives — no two are alike ? I believe 
I have had, in all the years of receiving them, but one case of 
duplicates. That was one from Berlin and its mate from San 
Francisco — which, again, illustrates the small size of this 
planet. It is as if one's friends conspired together about 
it. Individualities show, and that's one pretty thing about 
it, , . . We are trying to take winter in the nonchalant and 



( 126 ) 

merry fashion (the sang froid) of the two children that head 
the pretty procession on the card. We ought to be able to, for 
there are the others coming along in their turn in a few days 
and weeks. The longest winter is short enough when consid'^ 
as a fraction of the allottment of life (one t would have been 
enough, but see the instinctive desire to lengthen it !) 

I like best to print such things anonymously — all things, in 
fact, except polemic articles — or supposably cussable and 
fightable ones. I like to have here and there a friend know a 
thing is mine, but nobody else. I believe in it as a theory. It 
would promote good literature if adopted, and choke off much 
superfluity of gab. 

When are you, and some " seven spirits " as wicked as your- 
self and me, going to stir round and get up the coming univer- 
sity for N. Y. and the rest of the world ? Why did n't you get 
it done by Vanderbilt ? (i. e. why was n't it Vander-built !) 

It 's the thing that needs doing. Why should n't it be done ! 

How perpetually true it is that we never learn anything new 
about anybody when we have summered and wintered him in 
college ! I guess that 's the chief good of a college course — 
to know a few types right down to bedrock. (It 's a good sign 
as to the complex value of a college ed., that we are always 
finding some new thing that is the " chief good of a college 
course." 

Have I remarked to you a few hundred times that I have 
discov'i {^^\^ no one has a friend except college people. 
Business men who never went to college never have such a 
thing as an intimate friend. Don't know what the word 
means. 



( 127 ) 

I 've done nothing but public affairs — village affairs — for 
two months now. Must get to writing again, or the winter will 
be gone. 

As to , you have to take men as they are. Few of 'em 

perfect. " God takes good care the trees don't grow into the 

sky." is probably no more selfish and material-minded 

than some of the politer men who have learned, in society, to 
put their best foot foremost and hide their short-comings. We 
must make considerable allowance for the people who never 

have learned those airs and graces that conceal so much. 

never blarneys you or takes advantage of your soft side, or 
commends himself with those thousand subtle flatteries of the 
polished person. He shows what he is. To compare him 
fairly with x or y you must see x and y as t/iey are, too. 

It is snowing big blobs of white wool, and blowing still bigger 
ones off the piled fir-trees by the window. 

Snow — snow — and cold. I have dug paths and been off 
to see a poor family and take shoes to 'em — child of 7 died 
today. The sun flashed out as I got ready for supper, and 
made a superb light for a minute on the snowy trees — and 
then I tho' but there sits that mother by the dead child. 

If you had a maltese kitten to help you write your last 
letter, I have a catbird to help me write this. That is to say, 
he sits on one foot and looks down at the pen and then up at 
me, as if we were principal and amanuensis, respectively. I 
think that is about the humanest thing animals do — that 



( 128 ) 

looking up from your hands etc. to yoii. Why should n't the 
hand be " you," to them — it is their Hand of Providence (or 
Provender — much the same thing); but no — they recognize 
where the engineer of the machine resides — up in the turret 
of it — as well as the little girl in Punch — " Mamie, you must 
tie your own sash this time ! " " How can I, aunty, — I 'm in 
frotit!" Which reminds me of a joke I heard a man get off 
years ago. Somebody said of an acquaintance, " His face is 
against him." "Well, it would look mighty funny if it was 
anywhere else, would n't it ? " 

I 'm glad you and sometimes say to yourselves (and 

each other) that some bit of stuff or other is of my writing. It 
is very pleasant to have the very few people notice and care 
about what one writes. Per contra, I am getting more and 
more to prevent the many people from knowing, by not sign- 
ing my name — except in the case of a belligerent article, 
which of course must be signed. No fair to be popping off 
one's popguns in the dark. 

Your remark that Goethe may not have had much " cement " 
in his life is worth thinking of — I don't know as there is much 
of a plot in any one 's life. A few isolated, haphazard episodes, 
and toutfini. "Would it were other ! " 

•H- 

When one writes A. M. at the top of a letter (it occurred to 
me to ask as I began this sheet) (and for a wonder remembered 
it now; — when you have seven or eight things in your head as 
you begin a letter, do you ever get back to the others after you 
launch out on the first ?) what hour of the day does it bring to 
your mind? To me I think it means lo to 1 1. Perhaps with 
a thicker place in the image towards lo^ or ;^ to 1 1 ; and haz- 
ing out toward ii^ and 12. P. M. means about 4. . . . 

I have just increased my menagerie by a brown thrush. The 



( 129 ) 

relations between him and the catbird are a little strained this 
morning. To any one who keeps birds and makes friends of 
them this wearing of birds on hats is about as if women should 
wear a necklace of babies' toe-nails or of the dried ears of their 
deceased relatives. 

■5fr * 

Do you ever have times of seeing faces in everything? 
Wall-paper, carpets, etc?. . . . The truth is, this world is got 
up on a scale of great economy as to lines. The same curves 
and angles are made to do duty for all sorts of objects. Faces 
oi people are not nearly so different as they ought to be. What 
a variety a fourth dimension might lend to human countenances. 
I would rather be ever so homely and queer looking than to 
look so much alike as some people do. 

Dear Compatriot — (By the way, that's what our too-too 
hospitable constitution and flag say to the foreigner — eh ? 
Come — Pat ! — Riot !) Thank you for pamphlet, paper, and 
letter, and advice and information therein, upon the which I 
will act. I wish the Government publications of all sorts might 
be distributed with a little more judgematicalness. . . . Pub- 
lic Libraries — even small ones — might better have 'em than 
these " constituents " who make fires with 'em. It 's even worse 
with the publications of the different States. . . . What you 
want is a catbird— not stuffed, or only with boiled eggs and 
potaty. They 're great fun if you get one raised from the nest. 
Have you read — both of you — Olive Thorne Miller's little 
book about " Bird-ways " ? Cute. 






( 13° ) 

Spring has at last come all in a bunch. Everything is in 
blossom — except the rail fences — and I expect to see them 
out in bloom any morning. There never was so much blos- 
soming, of fruit trees and everything else ; and all three weeks 
ahead of calendar time. 

* 

The French writers have frequent allusions to people's 
ainour-propre. They seem to have come to a full recognition 
that it is a big motive with all human nature. Now I am 
convinced that this taking-on and keeping-on of bigger jobs 
than we can carry comes a good deal from exaggerated amour- 
propre. We like so devilish well to think we 're doing the 
work of four or five men. Especially if we feel we are doing 
it better than somebody else could or would. 

•5«- * 

I don't keep a large correspondence — how should a man 
correspond with more people than he corresponds tol . . 

I should like to hear you on the future of the mugwump : 
that means my own future, as well as yours. ... I 'm afraid 
there's one thing pretty certain in his immediate future — 
some appalling profanity during the next presidential cam- 
paign. ... It's an awful world (even "^vith coffee") for a 
man who knows a rascal and a fraud when he sees him : an 
awfully lonesome world. 

I should like very much to accept your call to " come back" 
and see you all — everybody is going to Cal^ nowadays. . . . 
"Some day," I always say to myself, "I am coming." 

•54- 'k 

My chief interest in life is in a house a foot square on top of 
a stub of old pear tree, one side of the roof hinged, wherein 



( 131 ) 

a pair of wrens have built (under daily inspection) a most 
wonderful feather-embowered boudoir, and wherein they are 
now turning sugarplums into wrenlets. "WTiat shadows we 
are and what shadows we pursue." 

You could learn French in the economized hours, in about 
two months, or even less for a reading knowledge (which will 
do). And I am more and more sure that you '11 have to learn 
French so as to have their light literature to fall back on when 
your illusions fade, their bright literature when everything 
seems dull and heavy, and their philosophical (Geo. Sand, par- 
ticularly) when everybody seems bigoted and hypocritical and 
afraid to say " It 's a fine day" lest it should n't after all be the 
view of the majority. I am reading Balzac's "Les Chouans" 
now. There 's no great value in Balzac. It 's only entertain- 
ing. A million cartloads of such bks never would civilize the 
smallest island. But one may do worse than to read 'em. 
Mind you, I do no^ read any dirty French bks. I have no 
professional duty to know just how bad f/iey are. 

Go and read Anna Kare'nina. English translation said to 
be from Russian direct. Great book. 

Don't read Salammbo ! 

It is the rarest thing in the world to find a man or a woman 
who will make the idea — the thing to be accomplished — the 
first and dominant thing. They are all seeking their own 
pleasure or profit. — In the light of such things, when it comes 
to the ethics of giving up your end of the log to another 
fellow, . . . does it not seem as if the self-abnegation itself 
were a positive good. The two men being judged equal in 
value, the angel could not decide — but the man can, for 



( 132 ) 

himself, because the mere fact of giving up self creates a value 
and turns the scale. For Jones to put Brown in his own place 
on the log would only substitute x for x. But the giving up of 
himself — that makes the act x + y instead of the previous 
X. The universe with Jones sticking to his log and Brown 
gone down would have only x. Now it has x + the act of ab- 
negation, or X + y. It is so much the richer, ... As to 
Anna Karenina, that is different. He knew she could not be 
happy with him, but he might have known she could not with 
the hero of the bull neck either. The thing for Wronsky to 
do (it 's W in the French version) would have been to hit 
straighter when he used the pistol. To miss himself was a 
great blunder, all round. She might have cured her husband 
of cracking his joints, and a different barber would have dis- 
guised the ears. But the man ought to have got off the log 
before ever he married her. A man should have the manli- 
ness to consider a little beforehand whether a poor girl is 
going to be happy with him — when he is older, and she very 
young and blind, at least. . . . 

To try to tell the exact truth — how few of the reviewers 
seem to have attained to that. 

I am reading Geo. Sand's correspondence. Of equal inter- 
est — or greater than her Histoire de ma Vie. Oh yes, you '11 
have to read French. . . . Keep a good courage, and when 
you get a little depressed about things, charge it to some phys- 
ical state, and appeal to Philip sober. I can see a good many 
bright possibilities, and a few probabilities. It 's fun that we 
are, anyhow. 

. . . The only great things, so far in the world — with 
great and enduring reputations — and great power in the 



( 133 ) 

world — and therefore great glory for the doers or founders of 
them — have been those that have based themselves on deep 
and permanent needs of man. No fiddlesticks of an industrial 
college, or mechanics training school . . . meeting only a news- 
paper demand, or demagogue demand. I wish he could realize 
the tremendous renown and power of Oxford and Cambridge — 
or of the big German Universities, and figure himself as beget- 
ting such another. Can't we raise Bishop Berkeley's spirit 
(where is the witch of Endor ?) to inflame him ? 

What a thing it might be, out there in Cal^, if he only would ! 
To start, you see, free of the old load of accumulated rubbish, 
and with the advantage of all that has been learned by means 
of, or in spite of this rubbish— It 's great. 

It is hot, and dusty, and a drought. But we 're all pretty 
well. Of course we can't do much that is useful — nobody 
does here in the summer. But it 's something to keep alive in 
a world as interesting as this is. Consid^ as a novel there are 
a good many nice plots being worked out in it. . . . Health 
first and everything in creation afterward is the only sensible 
rule. 

I have just pasted up (on my envelope box in front of me) 
this scrap out of some paper : " How," said one to Sir Walter 
Raleigh, "do you accomplish so much and in so short a 
time ? " " When I have anything to do, I go and do it," was 
the reply. — This has pertinence none at all, but I tho' I would 
pass it along as a good thing. I find more good things than I 
should expect to, in a world largely made up of such stupig 
people. Yet, on the other hand, how few good things one 
finds, when you come to consider how many bright people 
there are in the world ! 



( 134) 

Perhaps I have a right to despise other people's work a 
little, as I so heartily despise all my own in verse. The 
things way back — at our hearts — we verse-tinklers do not 
say. Too many listeners. ... I 've had a lot of letters — a 
small lot — in the last year or two, from strangers. . . . 
There ought to be more ways in which bright and good (or • 
who aim to be good) people could avoid their opposites and 
hit upon their kin. But the way thro' letters is not a very safe 
or satisfactory one. 

Hot as an oven, but interesting, when one can stand it — as 
we all contrive to do. They are literally splendid, such days. 
The sun seems to fill the sky, in the middle of the day. And 
you know we have shadows in such sunshine. Grey climates 
know nothing of the wonderfulness of the shade. Moonlight 
nights, too. 

* * 

I am interested just now in insects. Know anything about 
'em ? (By the way — nice little book about spiders you ought 
to read — by Emerton. . . . Did you ever see a cicada, or any 
of the cicadas, make their stridulation ? I have for the first 
time seen lately the little monotone-incessant fellows do it — 
they lift their wings up at right angles to their backs and rub 
them together. Great fun. I watch 'em by striking matches. 
Did you ever see a " 1 7 year locust " come out of his shell ? 
Do you know the gold bug (Coptocycla Aurea-chalcea) and his 
larva that carries a hinged parasol over his back — inhabitants 
of morning glories (wild and tame, but especially the Mex- 
ican)? . . . 

Speaking of poet did you see the anecdote — a rustic pair 



( 135 ) 

are married, and after the ceremony (dear, dear — I 've no 
time to tell this properly — then why delay for this parenthesis, 
you great loon !) the bride bursts into tears and says, " I never 
told you I don't know how to cook ! " " Never mind," sez he; 
" I am a poet, and I shall never have any food for you to cook!" 
— And so they lived happily ever after, 

I begin to believe that the people who know anything 
thoroughly and minutely about anything in the Animal King- 
dom are mighty rare. I never can find any ^ook, at least, which 
can tell me any but the obvious and surface facts about any 
living creature. My interest just now is in Insects. And I 
wish you'd ask the great Washington Chief Bug Sharp, or 
some other wise feller, what — on the whole — is the best 
book, or work, on insects. I 've been making some cursory 
observations, e. g., on the stridulating business ; but I can't 
find any good account of it in any book. Also the microscopic 
structure of the caterpillar's jaw apparatus. Also the cut and 
thrust stinger of the big black gad-fly — and half a dozen other 
things that I find (after a fashion) in my microscope. It gets 
to be vexing — when a man is hunting over a lot of books in a 
big library — to find them all telling such a string of obvious 
things, that everybody knows, and none of them telling you what 
you are trying to find out. I wish everybody was compelled 
in childhood to know all about some one thing, and to keep 
his mouth pretty much " shet up " about everything else. 

¥r 
^ ¥: 

. . . Have been for a week across the border into N. W. 
Pennsylvania, among some wildish baby-mountains with some 
good woods. . . . Had some good walks in fine dark rugged 



( 136 ) 

forest places, and almost could imagine it was California. It 
makes us sentimental and home-sick when that occurs. 

* •5fr 

. After an hour spent in straightening out papers — cleaning 
up two tables — (how they get rattled, these writing tables, if 
one does not exercise eternal vigilance !) I sat down to do some 
"literary" writing — but the spirits refuse to communicate — 
and it must be letterary, instead. In the process of clearing 
up I put away a volume of Geo. Sand's correspondence, which 
reminds me to quote (and translate) a bit of one I was reading 
last night. " You believe in the greatness of women, and you 
hold them for better than men. For my part, I don't think 
so. Having been degraded, it is impossible that they have not 
taken the [moeurs] morals and manners of slaves, and it will 
take more time to lift them out of it than would have been 
necessary for men to raise themselves. When I think of it I 
have the spleen j bnt I mean not to live too much in the 
present moment. We must not be too much beaten down 
by the general ill. Have we not affections, profound, certain, 
durable?" 

I might quote also the end of the letter: " Does my laziness 
about writing discourage you? But you know very well how 
this frightful trade of the scribbler makes you take a scunner 
to the very view of ink and paper." 

Rain — hot water. says the air is like soup, anywhere 

East of the Sierras in summer. 

It is (I have to tell you) the beautifullest early-Fall weather 
today. Ah me and ochhone, what a days that are no more ishness 
there is about it. You don't exactly have it in Cal=^ — The 
leaves on all the vines have been crying all night and hang all 



( 137 ) 

kind o' shamed of it and wilticated — and the sunshine is 
yellow and still — no more dance in it, tho' the crickets have 
piped unto it all the morning. Melons are ripe and grapes, 
and the coal is being got in — black reminder of the frost bite 
to come. . . . This weather or sumpthin or 'other makes me 
kind o' wishful for a ticket to California. 

¥: -x- 

Your reason for coming-in to Woman Suffrage is good and 
sound. Et ego. . . . 

I think you are right in suggesting that the sub-visible 
friend-image, and the unseizable word lie in the same cave. 
But I don't think it is quite the swooping down of the swallow 
(when we can just nof get a word by the handle), but a swoop- 
ing up of the mind-effort — we jump, and strain, and reach, 
then fall back exhausted — then try again, and almost touch 
the handle. Not down in a cave therefore, but floating in the 
foJ> cavity of the skull, like Frank Stockton's man with a 
balloon which would n't come down to be reached by his wife 
or anybody. And I guess this view is truer to the physical 
fact of the process: the word, or image, is a cell-connection in 
the brain — the effort is to drive a jet of nerve-force through 
it — but it sticks — the track isn't free, or something. 

•X- 

Boo'ful autumn days. "The flying gold of the Autumn 
woodlands drift." Soon it will be the "rotten woodlands drip 
and the leaf is stamped in clay." But we won't borrow trouble. 
... It's always pleasant to look forward to winter and think 
one may do some bit of worth-while writing. 

* 



( 138 ) 

D<^ you see in the Nation 14th, on French Humour? That 
is like the conscience money they send the P. O. Dept. — I 
wanted to make amends for my own vituperation. 

These B people . . . belong to a problematical class 

to me. They are good people, and do good. Yet I would 
always pray to be deliv'* from any association with them. Is 
it their blood (their inheritance), or their training, or what ? I 

met . . . He struck me as a perfect ass. Yet see the 

things he does, and does very well. ... I suppose the short 
word for it is Philistine. Yet they are Bohemians, too. I am 
coming to feel that the one sole and only mark and test of a 
plebeian (where "all the little soul is dirt") is this sticking 
themselves forward. And that the only thing necessary to prove 
a person, to me, a natural nobleman, is the willingness — nay, 
desire — to stay out of sight and be unannounced. I have a 
perfect loathing ... for these people that do this newspaper- 
puff business about themselves. — And by the way, I don't like 
this thing of small poets writing sonnets (signed duly with their 
small names) to bigger ones. Do you ? It 's getting common 
and unclean. And the mutual sonnetteering of the small ones 
to each other. 

* * 

A winter snowstorm to-night. — Loud roars the belast. Mer- 
cury just freezing point. . . . The snow is piling thick on 
houses, fences, trees. It is awfully white, so, in the night, with 
the gale rushing through it. — We are mere insects — But what 
things we can think ! 

Meantime I have read a little German. A German pub- 
lisher in Chicago, " Schick," publishes a series of 20 ct. book- 



( 139 ) 

lets of recent German short stories. ... I have been reading 
some of them . . . with a good deal of enjoyment. There is 
much in what you once said to me about the homely sincerity 
and earnestness of the Germans in contrast with the French. 
But they are pretty heavy and slow-moulded. I like the warm 
human feel of their house and home stories, though. 

I think of you as " walking alone like the rhinoceros," more 
and more as years go on. For in fact of the almanac, the years 
do seem to go on — hold back as we may. When I think how 
long I have been away from Berkeley I am driven to wonder 
tha^ I ever hear from any friend there. For Time carries not 
only a scythe and mows, but a hatchet and splits. A good 
ordinary quality of love seems to last in this world about a year 
and a half or two years of absence — a prime quality of friend- 
ship from five to seven ! Hail, O Time ! thou splitter apart of 
mortals. Splititandi salutamus ! 






January i, 1887. 

I don't like the years to go so. I was not half done with 

'86. ... 

I read this in Turge'nieff's Raufbold last night : 

" Er hatte viel gelesen; und so bildete er sich ein er besitze 
Erfahrung und Klugheit; er legte nicht den leisesten Zweifel 
dass alle seine Voraussetzungen richtig seien; er ahnte nicht 
dass das Leben unendlich mannigfaltig ist, und sich niemals 
wiederholt." 

So, to live is more than to read, and one might kriow all 
things and miss of everything. And so, if life is endlessly man- 
ifold, we may hope for good and great things, here or hereafter. 



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